Israeli Justice… a Futile Chase

by Stanley L. Cohen
CounterPunch

“Doctrine of Futility”
Seventeen years ago, 23 year old Rachel Corrie (a Washington State volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement) was crushed to death by an armored military bulldozer as she stood on top of a mound of dirt trying to prevent the dozer from destroying a civilian home in the Southern Gaza Strip village of Rafa. Wearing a bright orange vest and shouting out at the bulldozer through a megaphone, Corrie was murdered for the temerity of her unarmed act of peaceful defiance. More than a dozen years later the Israeli Supreme Court rejected her parents’ suit to hold Israel’s military accountable for her death. In finding that an “explicit statutory provision of the Knesset overrides the provisions of international law”, the Israeli High Court sacrificed well more than a century of settled international protections, including those memorialized under the laws of war and human rights, to the endless Israeli talisman of “wartime activity.”
More than a few historians can recall that very chant, raised and rejected at the Nuremberg Tribunals, which held Nazis accountable for targeted attacks on civilians throughout World War II.
Less than two months after the murder of Corrie, 34 year old James Henry Dominic Miller (a Welsh cameraman, producer and director who had won five Emmy awards for his work) was shot dead by an Israeli soldier, at night, while filming a documentary in the Rafah refugee camp. Moments after he and his crew left a Palestinian home bearing a white flag, two shots rang out. After the first shot a crew member cried out, “…we are British journalists.”. Soon, a second shot hit Miller, killing him instantly. Initially, one spokesperson reported that after the IDF discovered a tunnel at the house Miller had exited, he was shot in the back when caught in the middle of a crossfire precipitated by an anti-tank missile fired at Israeli troops. Another spokesperson said his death occurred during “…an operation taking place at night, in which the [Israeli] force was under fire and in which the force returned fire with light weapons.”
Later, both versions were retracted when it turned out that the round that killed Miller had entered not through his back but the front of his neck. Likewise, the tale of crossfire fell apart with witnesses reporting no such exchange of gunfire and none having been heard on an audio recording made contemporaneous to the incident.
Some two years later, an Israeli military police investigation into Miller’s killing was closed without returning any criminal charges against the Israeli soldier suspected of firing the fatal shot … though he was to be “disciplined” for violating the rules of engagement and for altering his account of what had occurred.
The following year, an inquest jury at St Pancras Coroner’s Court in London returned a verdict finding that Miller had been “murdered” and that the fatal shot matched rounds used by the IDF. Not long thereafter, the UK Attorney General made a formal request to Israel for it to prosecute the soldier responsible for firing the shot. That request was ignored. To date, no such proceedings have been undertaken by Israel …be it by an independent investigatory body, the military or the office of the state prosecutor.
In March of 2009, thirty-eight year old California native, Tristan Anderson, was hit in the forehead by a high-velocity teargas canister fired directly at him by an Israeli border policeman, some 60 metres away, following a regular joint Palestinian -Jewish demonstration against the Israeli separation barrier in the West Bank village of Ni’lin. When struck, Anderson was simply talking with three or four other activists in the center of the village some distance from the “shame wall” where the demonstration had earlier occurred. In the months prior, four Palestinians had been killed by soldiers during like demonstrations.
Taken to a hospital with his head split open, Anderson underwent three emergency brain operations which required the partial removal of his frontal lobe. The surgery, which left him in a coma and in critical condition, blinded his right eye and paralyzed half of his body. After fifteen months of hospitalization, Anderson returned home where, a decade later, he continues to require around the clock care because of permanent cognitive impairment and physical disability.
Several days after Anderson was crippled, Israeli police opened an investigation into the circumstances of the shooting. Given the 400 plus metre range of the canister, and their respective positions, there was clear evidence of criminal intent on the part of the soldier who shot Anderson. Despite this, the investigation was closed, some six months later, without explanation or any public finding… and with no criminal charges filed against any police or military personnel.
When no criminal charges were filed against those involved, the Andersons filed a civil law suit against Israel but waited years for the case to proceed in an Israeli court. Years later, the case remains very much in a state of judicial limbo with no determination as to it merits. Not unusual at all, counsel for the Anderson’s has noted that “…[t]he astonishing negligence of this investigation and of the prosecutorial team that monitored its outcome is unacceptable, but it epitomizes Israel’s culture of impunity. Tristan’s case is actually not rare; it represents hundreds of other cases of Palestinian victims whose investigations have also failed.”
As she walked out of the courtroom after a judicial proceeding into the civil lawsuit regarding the shooting of her partner, Gabby Silverman, who is Jewish, was served with an order that she had to leave Israel within the following 7 days because there was “insufficient proof that there was a lawsuit going on, and insufficient proof that she is a Jew.”
These three matters involving the murder or cripple of foreign nationals by Israel are very much the rule and not the exception in a state that sees dissent or disobedience as an open invitation for retaliation. For the fortunate, it means but arrest or expulsion for the less so …outright assassination.
For those who survive politically rooted Israeli assault, or their mourning heirs, the road to equity remains a dead end… one blocked by walls of incompetence or indifference… smothered by systemic delay and legislative fiat that convert black robes of justice to mere rubber stamps of state. To be sure, Israel’s failure to promptly and thoroughly investigate facts and circumstances, let alone to prosecute its agents… military or otherwise… who commit crimes against foreign nationals or to provide for an equitable and expeditious civil remedy for them or their loved ones, is well-known, indeed, notorious throughout the world.
For Palestinians, every step outside their home is to navigate a mine field of uncertainty; every encounter with an Israeli soldier or police officer a literal tempt to their life or liberty. The famed Israeli human rights center, B’Tselem, has archived a veritable cemetery of Palestinians victimized by extra-judicial Israeli assassination. Most cry out for justice from beyond the headstones that mark their name with little else but the smile of their memory. Meanwhile, loved ones wait for the call of justice… an echo, for almost all, never to be heard.

On July 13, 2011, twenty-one year old Ibrahim ‘Omar Muhammad Sarhan was shot dead at al-Far’ah Refugee Camp by soldiers who ordered him to stop during an arrest operation. When he refused, he was killed. Though a military investigation into his killing was opened, it was eventually closed, with no one charged, on the grounds “…that the shooting soldier’s conduct was not unreasonable given the overall circumstances and his understanding of the situation at the time.”
On February 23, 2012 twenty-five year old Tal’at ‘Abd a-Rahman Ziad Ramyeh was shot dead at the northeast corner to a-Ram, al-Quds District, after throwing a firecracker at soldiers during a clash with demonstrators. A military investigation into his death was closed “…on the grounds that the gunfire that killed Ramyeh was carried out in accordance with open fire regulations.”
On March 27, 2012, twenty-seven year old Rashad Dhib Hassan Shawakhah was wounded, in the village of Rammun, when he and his two brothers confronted two out-of-uniform soldiers who approached their home in the middle of the night. Believing the men to be burglars, the brothers, armed with a knife and a club, confronted the soldiers who, without identifying themselves, shot the three of them. Uniformed soldiers arriving at the scene shot Rashad, again, as he lay wounded on the ground. He died six days later. Although a military investigation was opened, more than seven years later no action has yet been taken.
On January 15, 2013, sixteen year old Samir Ahmad Muhammad ‘Awad of Budrus, Ramallah District, was shot and killed by soldiers near the Separation Barrier. After crossing the first barbed wire fence of the barrier, Awad was shot in the back and in the head as he tried to flee the soldiers’ ambush and return to Budrus. Although two soldiers were indicted, several years later, for reckless and negligent use of a firearm, the charges were eventually dismissed when prosecutors told the court that because their evidence had “weakened” there was no longer “…a reasonable prospect of conviction.”
On January 23, 2013, twenty-one year old Lubna Munir Sa’id al-Hanash was shot and killed while walking on the grounds of Al-‘ Arrub College, after a Molotov cocktail was thrown at an Israeli car traveling ahead of the vehicle in which the soldier who fired and the second-in-command of the Yehuda Brigade were passengers. The following year, an investigation into the killing by the military was closed after a finding that the “… shooting did not breach protocol and did not constitute any type of criminal offense.”
On December 7, 2013, fifteen year old Wajih Wajdi Wajih a-Ramahi was shot in the back and killed by soldiers, at the Jalazon Refugee Camp, while standing in the vicinity of teenagers in the camp who were throwing stones at the soldiers from approximately 200 meters away. Six years later, the case remains under military “investigation.”
On March 19, 2014, fourteen year old Yusef Sami Yusef a-Shawamreh of Deir al-‘Asal al-Foqa, Hebron District, was shot by soldiers after he and two friends crossed a gap in the Separation Barrier to gather gundelia [Arabic: ‘Akub], a thistle-like edible plant. Not long thereafter, a military investigation of the shooting was closed with a finding of the “…absence of a suspected breach of open fire regulations or criminal conduct on the part of any military personnel.”
On May 15, 2014, sixteen year old Muhammad Mahmoud ‘Odeh Salameh was shot in the back and killed in a protest near the village of Bitunya, near the Ofer military base, that included stone-throwing. He was not throwing stones when killed. Two years later, the military closed an investigation into the killing after it claimed that no evidence was found connecting a soldier to the shooting.
On July 22, 2014, twenty-nine year old Mahmoud Saleh ‘Ali Hamamreh of Husan, Bethlehem District, was shot in the chest and killed by soldiers when he stepped out of his grocery shop to observe clashes underway in the village. While a military investigation was initiated soon thereafter, four years later no decision has yet to be reached.
On August 10, 2014, ten year old Khalil Muhammad Ahmad al-‘Anati of the al-Fawwar Refugee Camp was shot in the back by a soldier while near other boys who were throwing stones at a military jeep in the Camp. He died of his wounds in hospital. Several years later, a military investigation into the child’s killing ended after “…the investigation found that the troops had acted out of a sense of mortal danger, and that no link between the gunfire and the death of the boy… could be proven.”
On July 23, 2015, fifty-three year old Fallah Hamdi Zamel Abu Maryah of Beit Ummar, Hebron District, was killed after soldiers entered his home, to make an arrest, and shot and wounded his son. When Abu Mariyah threw pottery at the soldiers from a second floor balcony of his home, soldiers shot him three times in the chest. A military “investigation” continues.
On September 18, 2015, twenty-four year old Ahmad ‘Izat ‘Issa Khatatbeh of Beit Furik, Nablus District, who was congenitally deaf, was shot in the back by soldiers near the Beit Furik Checkpoint. He died six days later. To date, it appears no investigation into his killing has been initiated.
On September 22, 2015, eighteen year old Hadil Salah a-Din Sadeq al-Hashlamun of Hebron was shot and killed when hit multiple times in her legs and upper body after refusing to stop on her way out of the Police (Shoter) Checkpoint. As it turned out a concealed knife was recovered from her. No criminal investigation into her killing was undertaken.
On October 5, 2015, thirteen year old ‘Abd a-Rahman Shadi Khalil ‘Obeidallah of the ‘Aydah Refugee Camp, Bethlehem District, was shot dead by soldiers as he stood, with other teenagers, approximately 200 meters away from a military post at Rachel’s Tomb where minor clashes were underway between Palestinians and soldiers. Although a military investigation into the child’s killing was initiated, no decisions have been reached more than four years later.
On November 6, 2015, seventy-two year old Tharwat Ibrahim Suliman a-Sha’rawi was shot dead by soldiers standing on a road after they “suspected” she was trying to run some of them over. Even after the car passed, soldiers continued firing at her. The military reported no investigation was launched as a “…preliminary review of the incident did not indicate suspicion of a criminal offense.”
On November 13, 2015, twenty year old Lafy Yusef Mustafa ‘Awad of Budrus, Ramallah District, was critically injured when shot in the back by soldiers after he broke free from their grasp and began to flee. Driven to hospital in a civilian vehicle, which necessarily took longer because of a military checkpoint, he was pronounced dead upon arrival. No investigation was undertaken as the military stated “…a preliminary review of the incident did not indicate suspicion of a criminal offense.”
On December 11, 2015, fifty-six year old ‘Issa Ibrahim Salameh al-Hrub of Deir Samit, Hebron District was shot and killed by Border Police and soldiers who “suspected” he was trying to run them over. Six months later, the military advised that no investigation would be launched into the incident as a “…preliminary review of the incident did not indicate suspicion of a criminal offense.”
On December 18, 2015, thirty–four year old Nasha’t Jamal ‘Abd a-Razeq ‘Asfur of Sinjil, Ramallah District, was shot and critically wounded, while walking home, by soldiers more than a hundred meters away who opened fire while other Palestinians threw stones at them. He died later that day in hospital. While a military investigation was opened it was apparently closed without any charges.
On February 10, 2016, fifteen years old ‘Omar Yusef Isma’il Madi of the al-‘Arrub Refugee Camp, Hebron District, was shot dead by a soldier in a military tower, at the entrance to the camp, while stones were being thrown at the tower. Though an investigation was launched, more than three year later no conclusion has been reported.
On May 4, 2016, twenty-three year old Arif Sharif ‘Abd al-Ghafar Jaradat of Sa’ir, Hebron District, (who had Down’s syndrome) was shot as he approached soldiers as they were leaving his village. He died six weeks later. Although a military investigation was closed because “…the gunfire at the casualty did not deviate from open-fire regulations” an appeal has been filed.
On June 21, 2016, fifteen year old Mahmoud Raafat Mahmoud Mustafa Badran of Beit ‘Ur a-Tahta, Ramallah, was fatally shot… and four other young men injured… by soldiers who fired on their car while they were driving through a tunnel on their way home from a night at a swimming pool. An investigation was closed by the military which concluded “…in light of the circumstances of the incident, the miss-identification of the car was an honest and reasonable error, and it was permissible for the troops to initiate suspect apprehension procedure.”
On October 20, 2016, fifteen year old Khaled Bahar Ahmad Bahar of Beit Ummar, Hebron District, was shot in the back and killed as he ran into a grove fleeing soldiers. Although an investigation was reportedly begun, more than three year later no action has ensued.
On October 31, 2017, twenty-six year old Muhammad ‘Abdallah ‘Ali Musa of Deir Ballut, was shot dead by soldiers, while driving to Ramallah with his sister, after soldiers had reportedly been alerted that a suspicious vehicle was approaching. Ordering the car to stop, one of the soldiers began to fire at the car, and continued even after it had passed by, without any of its passengers having tried to harm anyone. It was reported that Musa lay wounded on the ground for some 10 minutes without receiving any medical care and was later seized by soldiers while being treated by a Palestinian ambulance team. Two years after the military opened an investigation, it was closed because the soldiers had “…acted in accordance with open-fire regulations and because their operational actions did not evince ethic deficiency.”
On January 30, 2018, sixteen year old Layth Haitham Fathi Abu Na’im of al-Mughayir, Ramallah, was shot in the head and critically injured by a rubber-coated metal bullet fired by a soldier from 20 meters away, after returning to his village post clashes he had taken part in had ended. A military investigation is pending.
On December 4, 2018, twenty-two year old Muhammad Husam ‘Abd a-Latif Hbali of Tulkarm Refugee Camp, was shot in the head by soldiers from behind. Intellectually disabled, when shot, he was moving away from soldiers while carrying a stick. All was quiet at the time he was shot. A military investigation has been on-going since.
On December 14, 2018, eighteen year old Mahmoud Yusef Mahmoud Nakhleh of al-Jalazun Refugee Camp Ramallah, was shot in the back by soldiers from about 80 meters away while running near the entrance to the refugee camp… after others had thrown stones at a military post at its entrance. Soldiers dragged Nakhleh away by the arms and legs and denied him medical treatment for about 15 minutes. He died soon thereafter. A year ago, a military investigation was launched.
On December 20, 2018, seventeen year old Qassem Muhammad ‘Ali ‘Abasi of Ras al-‘Amud, East Jerusalem, was fatally shot in the back by soldiers, who were stationed near a checkpoint, as the car in which he and three of his relatives were passengers was driving away from the checkpoint. A military investigation was opened.
On March 20, 2019, twenty-two year old Ahmad Jamal Mahmoud Manasrah of Wadi Fukin, Bethlehem, was shot dead by a soldier who fired at him from a military tower near a local checkpoint. At the time he was killed, he was helping a family whose car had been shot at by soldiers and had pulled over. An investigation is pending.
On March 7, 2019, seventeen year old Sajed ‘Abd al-Hakim Helmi Muzher, a volunteer medic, from the a-Duheisheh Refugee Camp, Bethlehem District, was shot in the stomach as he ran to evacuate a Palestinian who had been shot in the leg when stones were being thrown at troops who had entered the camp. He died later that day. A military investigation is on-going.

These horrors are but a microcosm of a deadly, systemic tradition that has raged unabated for generations in which thousands of largely young Palestinians have been targeted, crippled and murdered without penalty of consequence to Israel’s military or security structure… essentially unmonitored and uncontrolled… indifferent to human rights and international law. Yes, there have been those rare empty exceptions in which a perverse judicial performance has made a mockery of life and law with token punishment meted out for crimes that shock the conscience of humanity.
Thus, on January 1, 2013, twenty-one year old ‘Udai Muhammad Salameh Darawish of a-Ramadin, Hebron District, was shot dead by soldiers near the Meitar checkpoint as he fled them after he entered Israel, for work purposes, without a permit. Following a military investigation and plea bargain to negligent manslaughter, a soldier received a seven-month suspended sentence and was demoted to sergeant.
Two more recent judicial miscarriages remind us, once again, that law in Israel remains but a gavel for Jews and a bludgeon for all others:
On May 10^th of this year, Elor Azaria, an Israeli medic who faced up to 20 years upon his conviction for manslaughter, walked out of prison after serving but nine months of an eighteen month sentence originally imposed on him by a military court. It was subsequently reduced to fourteen months by the IDF chief of staff and then again by the army’s prison parole board (and agreed to by military prosecutors) for his cold-blooded execution of twenty-one year old Abdul Fatah al-Sharif  who lay injured and motionless on the ground after stabbing, but not seriously injuring, an Israeli soldier in Occupied Hebron. With calm, deliberate ease, Azaria was recorded as he approached his victim, cocked his rifle and executed him with a single shot to his head.
Not long ago, an Israeli military court sentenced a soldier to one month of the military’s equivalent of community service over the execution of fifteen year old Othman Rami Halles who he shot dead during protests near the Israel fence east of the Gaza Strip on July 13, 2018. The unnamed soldier was convicted for “…acting without authorisation in a manner endangering to life and well-being.”
These sentences pale in comparison to those routinely imposed upon Palestinian children convicted of throwing stones. For example, sixteen year old stone thrower Saleh Ashraf Ishtayya was sentenced to three years and three months in prison. Fourteen year-olds Muhammad Ahmad Jaber and Murad Raed Alqam received three year sentences. Seventeen year old Muhammad Na’el and sixteen year old Zaid Ayed al-Taweel each received two years and four months in prison for the same offense. None of these children injured, let alone, took the life of an Israeli.
Tragically, casualties have long been the anguished, up-close face of the Occupation with an historical character that wields a deadly reach unmatched and long ignored by the world. As very much a perverse rite of passage, thousands of Palestinian civilians have paid the ultimate price for little more than their presence… lost to multiple high-tech military operations that have targeted residential communities and schools, hospitals and core infrastructure. Many more have been wounded or crippled by relentless Israeli attacks designed to leave survivors not just overwhelmed and battered but with a sense of isolation and futility. Nowhere has this brutal assault on fundamental human rights and international law been more conspicuous than through the sniper attacks on Gaza, over the past 18 months, that have slaughtered or injured tens of thousands of demonstrators whose only weapons have been the step of their march and the resound of their voice. And what of international law?
Volumes have been written on humanitarian law… the law of war and human rights. No doubt they line the walls of judicial halls throughout Israel… from its lowest military courtroom in the Occupied Territories to the highest civilian chamber that claims to rule supreme as the guardian of due process and equal protection for Israeli citizens and those held captive by it. Yet, even a cursory glance by an untrained eye leaves the imprint of a judicial system that is subservient to the chant of state security and legislative fiat and slowed to a process of delay that drags on and on for years leaving no one but Israeli Jews comfortable in the notion that they will have their day in court and with speed and fairness.
Millions of Palestinians are held captive in the Occupied Territories be it in the West Bank by security onslaught or military patrol or by the heap of Concertina wire, sniper mounds and air force and naval watch that keeps all of Gaza imprisoned every minute of every hour of every day. For these foreign nationals… and they are foreign nationals… they never see the inside of an Israeli civilian court or the due process it infers. For these perpetual prisoners, the uniformed soldiers that carry weapons become uniformed soldiers that investigate and prosecute cases to uniformed soldiers that pass judgment adorned not by robes of independence but by order of salute. As noted above in the archive of causality, few if any Palestinians ever obtain due process and equal protection of the law, let alone with independent and foreseeable resolution, as investigations and cases linger on for years pushed, predictably, to the back of the line as each new public outrage unfolds. This is not justice but the “Doctrine of Futility” at its primordial worst.
International Relief
It is settled law that before seeking international relief, aggrieved parties must first seek redress for harm, caused by a state, within its own domestic legal system. Exhaustion of local remedies (ELR) is intended to uphold state sovereignty by recognizing its own judicial process as a presumptive vehicle for the independent, equitable and expeditious resolution of claims against the state. ELR presumes a state’s judicial and administrative systems provide for a credible and apolitical avenue for injured foreign nationals to obtain their day in court before moving-on for diplomatic protection or undertaking international proceedings directly against the state. Yet, very much the proverbial beauty locked in the eyes of the beholder, provisions like equitable, independent and expeditious are routinely recast by repressive regimes across the globe to mirror little more than partisan safeguard of the state’s tyrannical needs and agenda.
Nowhere is that more palpably evident or painfully clear than it is in Israel where judicial remedies have long and repeatedly proven to be little more than a convenient faith based tease… a non-existent march to the beat of the overarching political gavel of the Knesset. For Israeli Jews, “all rise” portends opportunity denied all others. For Israeli Jews, lady justice cheats as she peeks out from behind her blindfold… for all others, she is but a symbol without a sign.
The ELR rule is a foundational mainstay of all global and regional international human rights entities and covenants. For example, within the UN, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights mandates that it’s Human Rights Committee “shall deal with a matter referred to it only after it has ascertained that all available domestic remedies have been invoked and exhausted in the matter, in conformity with the generally recognized principles of international law.”
Likewise, the European Convention on Human Rights provides that the European Court of Human Rights “may only deal with the matter after all domestic remedies have been exhausted, according to the generally recognized rules of international law.”
The American Convention on Human Rights requires exhaustion of local remedies “in accordance with generally recognized principles of international law” before the submission of petitions or communications to the commission.
The African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights provides that the Commission “can only deal with a matter submitted to it after making sure that all local remedies, if they exist, have been exhausted, unless it is obvious to the Commission that the procedure of achieving these remedies would be unduly prolonged.”
This exemption is but one of several that find smooth fit within the so-called “Doctrine of Futility.” Under this doctrine, while release from the requirements of the ELR fluctuates from venue to venue, by-in-large one need not chase domestic justice where none can be had. Thus, in general, ELR may be bypassed:

a. If the domestic legislation of the state concerned does not afford due process of law for the protection of the right or rights that have allegedly been violated;
b. If the party alleging violation of his rights has been denied access to the remedies under domestic law or has been prevented from exhausting them; or
c. If there has been unwarranted delay in rendering a final judgment under these remedies.

Israel is a veritable primer, a law school’s teach, on when and where all three damning exemptions merge to validate an apt and speedy march to the nearest international forum in pursuit of justice and human rights otherwise willfully denied foreign nationals in any courthouse or military barrack that flies the banner of the Star of David.
And just who are foreign nationals? In most jurisdictions they cut a relatively narrow swath; typically but a handful of tourists, temporary workers, or businesses and those incidentally injured by practices of cross-border states. Yet, the numbers balloon to millions of foreign nationals in occupied Palestine where all aspects of every Palestinian’s life is impacted… if not controlled… daily by an occupation force and judicial process of another state.
Independent of the pervasive culture of military and security violence and its companion lack of fairness and accountability, the Israeli judicial system… both criminal and civil… presents a compelling case study in a double standard delayed and disabled based solely upon ones faith and national identity.
Child Prisoners
Over the last two decades, more than 8,000 Palestinian children (foreign nationals) have been arrested in the Occupied Territories and prosecuted in an Israeli military system devoid of any meaningful due process or equal protection for the most vulnerable and traumatized among those that have known nothing but the bark of occupation their entire lives. It is a military justice process notorious for the systematic ill-treatment and torture of Palestinian children.
Several hours after their arrest, these children arrive at an interrogation and detention center alone, tired, and frightened. All interrogations, by their very nature, are inherently coercive no matter the age or experience of its victim. None are more so than for an often bruised and scared child forced to go through the process without the benefit of counsel or the presence of parents who are never permitted to participate.
Israeli law provides that all military interrogations must be undertaken in a prisoner’s native language and that any statement made must be reduced to writing in that language. Despite this prohibition, Palestinian detainees are typically coerced into signing statements, through verbal abuse, threats, and physical violence, that is memorialized by police in Hebrew… which most cannot understand. These statements usually provide the main evidence against children in Israeli military courts.
The Military Court Process
The military “courts” themselves are held inside military bases and closed to the public… and usually family members of the accused. Within these courts, military orders supersede Israeli civilian and international law.
In military courts, all parties… the judge, prosecutor and translators… are members of the Israeli armed forces. The judges are military officers with minimal judicial training and, by-in- large, served as military prosecutors before assuming the bench. The prosecutors are Israeli soldiers, some not yet certified as attorneys by the Israeli Bar. Under the rules of Occupation, all defendants in military courts are Palestinian… as the jurisdiction of the Israeli military court never extends to some eight hundred thousand Jewish settlers living in the West Bank who are accorded the full panoply and safeguard of Israeli civil law.
Under military law, Palestinians can be held without charge, for the purpose of interrogation, for a total period of 90 days during which they are denied the benefit of counsel. Detention can be extended without limit and requires but an ex parte request of military prosecutors. By comparison, a Jewish citizen accused of a security offense, within the Occupied Territory, can be held without indictment in the civil process for a period of up to 64 days during which time counsel is available at all times.
Though Palestinian detainees are entitled to military trials which must be completed within eighteen months of their arrest, their detention can be extended indefinitely, by a military judge, in multiple six-month increments. It is this limitless process which has left thousands of Palestinian political detainees imprisoned for years on end without the benefit of counsel, formal charges, or trial. The comparable time limit for detainees in Israeli civilian courts is no more than nine months.
While criminal liability begins at age twelve for Palestinians and Israelis alike, under the military system Palestinians can be tried as adults at sixteen. For Israelis, prosecution as an adult in a civilian court is eighteen. This two year difference, without physical distinction of consequence, can mean a sentence disparity of many years should a conviction ensue. In some cases, it can literally mean a difference between a few years in prison versus decades upon conviction.
Although the United Nations has repeatedly held that the military justice system in the Occupied Territory violates international law, it has done nothing to ensure equal protection and due process to hundreds of thousands denied justice by virtue of being Palestinian and nothing else. This continues to be true for Palestinian minors. According to B’tselem “…at the end of October 2019, 185 Palestinian minors were held in Israeli prisons as security detainees and prisoners, including one under the age of 14.”
Neighborhood Cleansing
With the onset of the Occupation in 1967, Israel initiated a wide range of largely extrajudicial strategies in its incessant effort to claim new municipal boundaries and to remake the age old Palestinian character of east Jerusalem. What began with the seize of large swaths of vacant land surrounding the Old City… for the construction of illegal Jewish settlements… eventually gave rise to the de facto annexation of East Jerusalem… universally condemned as a flaunt of international law. However, never ones to allow legal standards to become barricade to political needs, successive Israeli governments have accelerated the Judaization of the historic capital of Palestine, typically using the call of security as a pretext, while Israel’s judiciary has looked away…largely indifferent to its responsibility to ensure that equal justice be done.
Recently, Israel destroyed 10 mostly unfinished buildings containing some 70 apartments, in the Wadi Hummus neighborhood on the edge of southeast Jerusalem, which were being built with permits issued by the Palestinian Authority in an area under its recognized jurisdiction. Displacing 17 Palestinians, including an older couple and five children, from apartments that were finished, the demolitions also left several hundred others, awaiting housing in the buildings, saddled with ensuing economic loss. Though condemned by the United Nations, the government nonetheless proceeded with the demolitions after Israel’s High Court refused to intervene on the grounds that the project was being built in a military-declared buffer zone near a “security” fence that had gone up years before. That barrier, which is part of the system of steel fences and concrete walls which runs throughout the West Bank and around Jerusalem, was subsequently found to be illegal by the International Court of Justice in 2004. Like hundreds of other international declarations, Israel ignored the findings.
The destruction of these residential buildings is by no means an isolated or unpredictable phenomenon. In point of fact, another one-hundred buildings completed, or under construction, under similar circumstances in the same neighborhood, face the same risk.
While the proffered basis for demolitions has changed to suit the Israeli needs of the moment, they play an essential mainstay in its intended policy of ethnic cleansing throughout east Jerusalem. This modern-day pogrom finds its genesis in a cap that was placed on the expansion of Palestinian neighborhoods in the days following the seizure of east Jerusalem, thereby forcing many to build illegally according to the laws of the Occupation. This artificial limit has been exacerbated by systemic discrimination when it comes to the issue of building permits in east Jerusalem. Though Palestinians make up more than 60% of the population of the Old City according to the Israeli civil rights group Peace Now, they have received just 30% of the building permits issued by Israel dating back to 1991. Given these circumstances, it has been estimated that more than twenty-thousand housing units built in traditional Palestinian neighborhoods dating back to 1967 fall into the category of illegal… thus placing them at risk of demolition no matter what their condition, how long they have stood or the numbers of their occupants.
This danger has found new impetus since the United States moved its Embassy to east Jerusalem, essentially declaring it to be the capital of Israel. Emboldened by this act, and not now fearing either political or economic reprisal by the United States (or meaningful intervention by its own courts), Israel has recently accelerated its demolition policy leading to the destruction of several hundred residential and commercial structures… leaving hundreds of Palestinians homeless and dozens of businesses in ruins.
While precise figures are unknown, it is estimated that, over the last fifteen years, more than one thousand- five hundred residential and commercial units have been demolished by Israel leaving more than three-thousand Palestinians homeless… including some one thousand- five hundred minors.
Of late, we have seen an increase in the number of demolitions carried out by Palestinians, themselves. While some construe the demolition of several dozen Palestinian structures by their own residents as almost a willful, romanticized act of political defiance, self-demolition has less to do with self-determination than it does the unbearable cruelty and cost of the moment. The aching reality is that a judicial system without justice has authorized the state to bill those for the cost of the destruction of their own homes… lest they do so themselves.
Collective Punishment
While Israeli authorities have argued that punitive home demolitions provide “…a severe message of deterrence to terrorists and their accomplices”, such demolitions violate the Fourth Geneva Convention as well as a host of Israel’s human rights obligations… in particular that no-one should be punished for an act they did not commit. Under Israeli law, those subject to punitive home demolitions are accorded an opportunity to appeal a demolition order to a court. However, Israel’s High Court has routinely refused to consider the absolute prohibition in customary international law against collective punishment of civilians in occupied territory when ruling on petitions against punitive home demolitions in the West Bank, including in east Jerusalem. As almost settled law, the Court has held that demolitions can, in general, be justified as “proportionate” when balanced against the need to deter other Palestinians from carrying out future attacks. Moreover, as a practical matter, rare are the opportunities for prospective victims to obtain timely judicial relief thru applications for review of looming military demolitions.
Thus, according to Article 119 of the Military Authority, the IDF commanders responsible for application of military measures in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are empowered to confiscate and demolish any property, if he determines that the inhabitant…and not necessarily owner… of the property resorted to terrorist violence. That power is not vested or required to go through judicial process but rather is purely administrative. Thus there is no need for a court order to authorize house demolitions and the evidence required to demolish a home carries for the military a low threshold of internal administrative proof …“…convincing in the eyes of a reasonable decision maker.”
Though reprisal has long enjoyed a high degree of support among the Israeli public, and thus politicians, there can be no reasoned debate over whether house demolitions constitute a form of collective punishment, and thus a war crime. Prohibited under basic principles of human rights law and Articles 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 and Article 50 of the 1907 Hague Regulations, demolitions also constitute cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment and are selectively applied as against Palestinians and never Jews who commit acts of terrorism.
At their core, these demolitions, which also violate the prohibition on the destruction of private property set forth under Article 53 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and Article 23(g) of the 1907 Hague Regulations, seek not to penalize a “terrorist” who is likely dead or in custody charged with serious offenses and facing years, if not decades, in prison, but rather, family members who reside in the home targeted for military reprisal. Thus, innocent parents, husbands or wives, children and siblings or other residents are left homeless as they are forced to bear the consequences of the acts of loved ones, even in the absence of any prior knowledge or nexus to them.
Although Israel has periodically suspended home demolitions, in times of heightened tension or militant resistance they have become very much part of the military mainstream since the onset of the Occupation. While the exact number of such demolitions is neither documented nor certain, it is estimated that more than 2,000 Palestinian homes have been destroyed pursuant to Article 119 since 1967. Though the Israeli High Court requires the IDF commander to hold a hearing for the residents of a property to be destroyed and permits a petition to the court to stay the demolition, these “safeguards” have proven to be a promise without purpose. While the court has stressed those demolitions are harsh security measures that should be used only in “extreme circumstances” not once has it overridden the authority of the IDF to proceed accordingly.
Lest there be any doubt that history can be but a harbinger of things to come, some of those that run the bulldozer of today in Palestine are progeny of those who picked through the rubble of homes and businesses ransacked and destroyed as collective punishment for acts of terrorism. Undoubtedly a pretext, in 1938, following the assassination of a German Embassy attaché in Paris by a young Polish-German Jew, a campaign of collective reprisal was unleashed against Jews in Germany. Known as Kristallnacht, crowds set fire to synagogues, smashed shop windows, demolished furniture and stocks of goods with the approval of the German Government. Years later Nazis applied the principle of Sippenhaft (collective responsibility) to avenge the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich ,the architect of the “Final Solution to the Jewish question”, through mass executions and the destruction of two Czech villages… Lidice and Lezaky.
With predictable promote, Prime Minister Netanyahu recently indicted the ICC investigation of Israel for war crimes and crimes against humanity as little more than anti-Semitism. Putting aside Netanyahu’s readily transparent canard, at its core, the ICC typically does not exercise its jurisdiction pursuant to the Rome Statute unless and until a state fails to provide a meaningful domestic remedy for violations of international law. On this score, few can deny that no such equitable and effective opportunity exists within Israel. As noted by Human Rights Watch, “…the impetus for the establishment of the ICC is the stark failure of national court systems to hold the perpetrators of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes accountable under law.”
Be it by virtue of the blanket political control of the Knesset or the deadly untamed reach of its security apparatus, Israel’s judiciary stands as an emasculated reminder that foreign nationals, whether occupied Palestinians or Westerners seen as enemies of the state, have not, and cannot, obtain due process and equal protection of the law, let alone in an independent and expeditious manner, through Israel’s judicial process. Under these circumstances, the Doctrine of Futility overshadows the need to exhaust local remedies to seek international relief for domestic wrongs. The Doctrine does not provide for an easy and settled pathway for foreign nationals to obtain justice outside the confines of extant domestic procedure. Yet, at its core, this international exemption finds its greatest potential and need when and where, as here, a judicial system is built upon a double standard of law… one for Palestinians, the other for Jews.

Stanley L. Cohen is lawyer and activist in New York City.

The Homecoming

by Alice Speri
The Intercept

How Ahed Tamimi Became the Symbol of Palestinian Resistance to Israeli Oppression

NABI SALEH, WEST BANK — As if anyone needed reminding, even on the day of her release from prison, Israeli authorities seemed to want to show Ahed Tamimi, her family, and her many supporters that they control Palestinian lives.

Ahed and her mother, Nariman, were supposed to be freed on Saturday after serving an eight-month sentence in an Israeli military prison, but because Saturday is not a work day in Israel, their release was postponed. On Sunday, their family was told that they would be freed at 7 a.m. at a military checkpoint in the northern West Bank, nearly an hour and a half drive from their village, Nabi Saleh. When relatives and friends arrived there, the military sent them, as well as dozens of members of the press, to a different checkpoint, nearly two hours in the opposite direction. When they reached there, Bassem Tamimi was told, again, that his daughter and wife would be released at the first checkpoint. As the convoy of cars turned around one more time, they received another call telling them to head back to the second checkpoint.

“They were playing cat and mouse; they were trying to break everyone,” Manal Tamimi, Ahed’s aunt, told The Intercept. “They don’t need to give any justification. They just do what they want.”

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Teaching ‘Les Misérables’ in Prison

by Chris Hedges
Truthdig

I spent the last four months teaching Victor Hugo’s 1862 novel “Les Miserables” at a maximum-security prison in New Jersey. My students?like Hugo’s main character, Jean Valjean, who served 19 years in prison?struggle with shame, guilt, injustice, poverty and discrimination, and yearn for redemption and transformation. The novel gave them a lens to view their lives and a ruling system every bit as cruel as Hugo’s 19th-century France.

“Les Miserables” was wildly successful when it was published, including among Civil War soldiers in the United States, although Hugo’s condemnation of slavery was censored from Confederate copies. It was American socialist leader Eugene V. Debs’ favorite book?he read it in French. The socialist British Prime Minister Lloyd George said “Les Miserables” taught him more about poverty and the human condition than anything else he had ever read and instilled in him a lifelong ambition “to alleviate the distress and the suffering of the poor.” Hugo’s novel, however, enraged the ruling elites. It was panned by French critics. Copies were burned in Spain. Pope Pius IX put it on the church’s list of banned books, along with “Madame Bovary” and all the novels of Stendhal and Honore de Balzac.

“While through the working laws of customs there continues to exist a condition of social condemnation which artificially creates a human hell within civilization, and complicates with human fatality a destiny that is divine; while the three great problems of this century, the degradation of man in the proletariat, the subjugation of women through hunger, the atrophy of the child in darkness, continue unresolved; while in some regions social asphyxia remains, while ignorance and poverty persist on earth, books such as this cannot fail to be of value,” Hugo wrote in the preface.

My students interpreted the novel through the peculiar reality of prison, something that would have pleased Hugo, who relentlessly chronicled the injustices meted out to the poor by ruling institutions and agents of the law. The heroes in his book are the outcasts, the demonized and the impoverished?les miserables?as well as the rebels, usually doomed, who rise up in their defense. The theme that runs through the novel can be summed up in Leo Tolstoy’s dictum: “The only certain happiness in life is to live for others.”


Jean Valjean, after 19 years in prison?five for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sister’s hungry children and 14 more as punishment for attempts at escape?is released with no home, no occupation and little money. He tramps through the French countryside, ending up in the town of Digne. He is required to present to local authorities his yellow identity card, a document that brands him for life as an ex-convict. He is refused a room at several inns, despite having the money to pay for lodgings. Finally, after Valjean is found sleeping outside, Monseigneur Bienvenu, the local bishop, gives him a place to rest in his modest house. Valjean arises early and, leaving before the bishop wakes, steals the household silver?platters, forks, knives and spoons?the cleric’s last and only extravagance after having given away most of his possessions to the poor. The gendarmes spy Valjean on the road with his plunder. They haul him before Monseigneur Bienvenu. The bishop lies to the gendarmes, saying he gave the silver to Valjean. After the police leave, he turns to Valjean: “Do not forget, do not ever forget, that you have promised me to use the money to make yourself an honest man. … Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to what is evil but to what is good. I have bought your soul to save it from black thoughts and the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God.”

Valjean, shaken, nevertheless commits one final crime. He robs a boy of a coin, almost instinctively, but it was “an act of which he was no longer capable.” The theft plunges him into despair. He desperately searches for the boy to return the coin. He cannot find him. The boy has run away in terror. Valjean vows to become a different man.

The decision by the bishop to lie on behalf of Valjean triggered an intense debate in my classroom.

“Who would do this?” a student asked.

“No one,” another student answered.

Several students dismissed the scene as improbable.

And then from the back of the room a student, speaking in emotional undertones, told this story.

“I came back to my bunk one day,” he said. “There was a new Bible on it. Inside was a letter. It was from my victim’s sister. She wrote, ‘I forgive you. Now you must forgive yourself.’ I broke down. I could be more than a criminal. I could change. She made that possible.”

My students will spend their lives condemned as felons. They, like Valjean, will never completely wash away the mark of Cain. Transformation, even when it occurs, will not free them from the criminal caste system. Transformation must be carried out not for what it will achieve, for often it will achieve nothing, or how it will be perceived, for most of the wider society will not perceive it. Transformation is about making peace with yourself. It is about obeying your conscience, which Hugo equates with the divine. It is about never living at the expense of another. Transformation is about rising above the hatred many feel, with justification, for a society that has betrayed them.

“If you are persecuted for virtue, why be virtuous?” a student asked.

“Those who have nothing need other people,” another student said. “We can’t survive alone. The more we sacrifice for those around us, the more we reduce our collective suffering; the more we recover our humanity, the more people reach out to us when we need help, and we all need help. Goodness is contagious.”

And yet, as my students know, this internal battle is hard and fierce within a society that denies the poor dignity and respect.

“Obscurely he perceived that the priest’s forgiveness was the most formidable assault he had ever sustained,” Hugo wrote of Valjean, “that if he resisted it his heart would be hardened once and for all, and that if he yielded he must renounce the hatred which the acts of man had implanted in him during so many years, and to which he clung. He saw dimly that this time he must either conquer or be conquered, and that the battle was not joined, a momentous and decisive battle between the evil in himself and the goodness in the other man.”

Hugo was aware that there are some who cannot be redeemed. They are incapable of empathy or remorse. They are driven by greed and ambition. They take a perverse joy in inflicting suffering on others. They are capable only of deceit. These people must be kept at bay. In the novel they are represented by Monsieur and Madame Thenardier, “human creatures which, like crayfish, always retreat into shadow, going backwards rather than forwards through life, gaining in deformity with experience, going from bad to worse and sinking into even deeper darkness.”

This cold reality, nevertheless, proved to be a painful one to digest in the classroom. Several students argued passionately that everyone, no matter how depraved, could ultimately be redeemed, and yet the reality of prison, my students conceded, amply illustrates that there are human predators to whom one can never show vulnerability or expect mercy. Fyodor Dostoyevsky described hell as the inability to love. These predators inhabit this hell. This internal hell, a barrenness of the soul, is exemplified in the police inspector Javert, who hounds Valjean throughout the novel. Hugo wrote, “The Austrian peasants believe that in every wolf-litter there is a dog-whelp which the mother kills, because otherwise when it grows larger it will devour the rest of her young. Endow this dog with a human face, and you have Javert.”

Javert, born in a prison to a mother who was a fortune teller and a father who was a convict, came from the underclass he persecuted. The social backgrounds of corrections officers, police and prisoners were then, and are today, often the same; indeed it is not uncommon for prisoners and corrections officers to have familial ties. Javert embraced the rigid code of the law and absolute state authority, which absolved him from moral responsibility. “His duties were his religion,” Hugo wrote. Javert’s iron fealty to the letter of the law is juxtaposed with Valjean’s fealty to empathy and justice, which is repeatedly criminalized by those in power.

There is a moment in the novel when a man named Champmathieu is hauled into court and accused of being Valjean, who has broken parole and is living under the assumed name of Monsieur Madeleine. Javert and three witnesses who were in prison with Valjean insist the man is Valjean. Valjean, under his pseudonym, has become the prosperous mayor of Montreuil-sur-Mer. If he remains silent, allowing the innocent Champmathieu to go to prison in his place, he will throw the police off his trail permanently. During a night of anguished indecision, he burns his last personal effects from his life as a convict, but then sees the coin he stole from the boy when he left the bishop’s house?a coin that represents his last crime and his transformation. He goes to the courtroom. He announces to the stunned court that he is Valjean. He condemns himself, but recovers his name. He saves his soul.

The importance of a name, and the idea that carrying out a moral act means you will be crucified by the ruling elites, intrigued my students, most of whom, like Valjean, are known by their prison numbers. Valjean, Hugo wrote, sacrificed “his personal security to his moral principles” and “had, it seems, concluded after the manner of saints and sages, that his first duty was not to himself.” Jean Valjean, through this act of self-sacrifice, emerged from the court “even more honored and secure than before.” He had, in Hugo’s words, taken up the cross. Hugo went on:

Certainly his life had a purpose, but was it simply to hide himself, to outwit the police? Had everything he had done been for no better reason than this? Had he not had a greater purpose, the saving not of his life but of his soul, the resolve to become a good and honorable and upright man as the bishop required of him?had not that been his true and deepest intention? How he talked of closing the door on the past when, God help him, he would be reopening the door by committing an infamous act, not merely that of a thief but of the most odious of thieves. He would be robbing a man of his life, his peace, his place in the sun, morally murdering him by condemning him to the living death that is called a convict prison. But if, on the other hand, he saved the man by repairing the blunder, by proclaiming himself Jean Valjean the felon, this would be to achieve his own true resurrection and firmly close the door on the hell from which he sought to escape. To return to it in appearance would be to escape from it in reality. This was what he must do, and without it he would have accomplished nothing, his life would be wasted, his repentance meaningless, and there would be nothing left for him to say except, “Who cares?”

Hugo added: “It was his most melancholy destiny that he could achieve sanctity in the eyes of God only by returning to degradation in the eyes of men.” He is filled with terror, yet proceeds. “Whichever way he looked,” Hugo wrote, “the course of duty glared at him as though the words were written in letters of fire?‘Stand up and say your name!’ ” He could “cling to his paradise and become a devil, or become a saint by going back to hell.”

To save Champmathieu, Valjean gives up his freedom. In this singular act of justice and heroic self-sacrifice he exposes the bankruptcy and corruption of the courts, including the lie of authority. He elevates a convict, Jean Valjean, to a higher morality. He redeems his name and the names of all convicts. The price is catastrophic. But the price for moral acts is usually catastrophic. No one is rewarded for virtue. In my class this chapter triggered a discussion of Immanuel Kant’s “categorical imperative,” the idea that there are things we must do no matter what the consequences. The moral life, as Hugo pointed out, is not pragmatic or rational. It does not guarantee that we as distinct individuals survive. And yet, it permits us, by living for others, to become our best selves. It allows us a bittersweet happiness.

Valjean finds his ultimate fulfillment in raising the orphan Cosette. Most of my students have children. They struggle in prison to hold on to their role as fathers. Their children are often the only way left for them to have influence on the outside. But, as in the novel, these children grow up and drift away.

One of my students, serving a life sentence without parole and unable to be with his small daughter, structured his day as if she was in the cell with him. He woke her up in the morning. He cooked for her. He spoke to her. He read books to her. He wrote long letters. Every night he said goodnight to her as if she were in the next bunk. This ritual was not only about loss. It preserved his identity as something other than a prisoner. It allowed him to retain the title of father. It kept alive the virtues of nurturing, tenderness and love that prison can often crush. Hugo’s understanding of the titanic internal struggle to be human in an inhuman environment was intimately familiar to my 26 students.

Valjean, at 80, is consumed by the isolation that grips many in prison, dying alone, condemned as one of les miserables with no friends or family. Cosette has married. He feels forgotten. In the final scene his beloved Cosette appears as he dies.

We began each class with a student summarizing the main points in the week’s reading. On the day of the final class a student, Joel, rose to speak, holding two pages of notes.

“I think about the final interaction between Valjean, Cosette and Marius [her husband],” he said. “I think about the strength in [Valjean] for all he had suffered, all he had sacrificed, all he had endured just for the beauty and simplicity of love. I think about those last moments between them, the thankfulness for the opportunity to love; the opportunity to not be alone in his last moments; the opportunity to live. I thank Hugo for the picture he painted for me here. … I think about the man who became my father and how much pain and suffering I have caused him. I think about the things he sacrificed for me. I think about all the challenges he took on for the sake of me. Yet despite it all I think about how much love I have had the opportunity to share with him, how much life he has given me. I pray that on his last day he may be able to rest his hand on my head, to feel a sense of accomplishment when it comes to his son, to be free of this world with a sense of happiness. That I too can one day say [quoting lines penciled onto Valjean’s gravestone]:

He sleeps. Although so much he was denied,
He lived; and when his dear love left him, died.
It happened of itself, in the calm way
That in the evening the night-time follows day.

A Bernie Sanders-Led Party Still Would Be an Imperialist, Pro-War Party

by Glen Ford
Black Agenda Report via Truthdig


The United States is a predator nation, conceived and settled as a thief, exterminator and enslaver of other peoples. The slave-based republic’s phenomenal geographic expansion and economic growth were predicated on the super-exploitation of stolen African labor and the ruthless expropriation of native lands through genocidal wars, an uninterrupted history of plunder glorified in earlier times as “Manifest Destiny” and now exalted as “American exceptionalism,” an inherently racist justification for international and domestic lawlessness.

Assembled, acre by bloody acre, as a metastasizing empire, the U.S. state demands fealty to its imperial project as a substitute for any genuine social contract among its inhabitants?a political culture custom-made for the rule of rich white people.

The American project has been one long war of aggression that has shaped its borders, its internal social relations, and its global outlook and ambitions. It was founded as a consciously capitalist state that competed with other European powers through direct absorption of captured lands, brutal suppression of native peoples and the fantastic accumulation of capital through a diabolically efficient system of Black chattel slavery?a 24/7 war against the slave. This system then morphed through two stages of “Jim Crow” to become a Mass Black Incarceration State?a perpetual war of political and physical containment against Black America.

Since the end of World War 2, the U.S. has assumed the role of protector of the spoils of half a millennium of European wars and occupations of the rest of the world: the organized rape of nations that we call colonialism. The first Black U.S. president, Barack Obama, was among the most aggressive defenders of white supremacy in history?defending the accumulated advantages that colonialism provided to western European nations, settler states (like the U.S.) and citizens?having launched an ongoing military offensive aimed at strangling the Chinese giant and preventing an effective Eurasian partnership with Russia. The first phase of the offensive, the crushing of Libya in 2011, allowed the United States to complete the effective military occupation of Africa, through AFRICOM.
The U.S. and its NATO allies already account for about 70 percent of global military spending, but Obama and his successor, Donald Trump, demand that Europeans increase the proportion of their economic output that goes to war. More than half of U.S. discretionary spending?the tax money that is not dedicated to mandated social and development programs?goes to what Dr. Martin Luther King 50 years ago called the “demonic, destructive suction tube” of the U.S. war machine.

The United States does not have a national health care system worthy of the name, because it is in the war business, not the health business or the social equality business. The U.S. has the weakest left, by far, of any industrialized country, because it has never escaped the racist, predatory dynamic on which it was founded, which stunted and deformed any real social contract among its peoples. In the U.S., progress is defined by global dominance of the U.S. State?chiefly in military terms?rather than domestic social development. Americans only imagine that they are materially better off than the people of other developed nations?a fallacy they assume to be the case because of U.S. global military dominance. More importantly, most white Americans feel racially entitled to the spoils of U.S. dominance as part of their patrimony, even if they don’t actually enjoy the fruits. (“WE made this country great.”) This is by no means limited to Trump voters.

Race relations in the U.S. cannot be understood outside the historical context of war, including the constant state of race war that is a central function of the U.S. State: protecting “American values,” fighting “crime” and “urban disorder,” and all the other euphemisms for preserving white supremacy.

War is not a side issue in the United States; it is the central political issue, on which all the others turn. War mania is the enemy of all social progress?especially so, when it unites disparate social forces, in opposition to their own interests, in the service of an imperialist state that is the tool of a rapacious white capitalist elite. Therefore, the orchestrated propaganda blitzkrieg against Russia by the Democratic Party, in collaboration with the corporate media and other functionaries and properties of the U.S. ruling class, marks the party as, collectively, the Warmonger-in-Chief political institution in the United States at this historical juncture. The Democrats are anathema to any politics that can be described as progressive.

Bernie Sanders is a highly valued Democrat, the party’s Outreach Director and therefore, as Paul Street writes, “the imperialist and sheep-dogging fake-socialist Democratic Party company man that some of us on the ‘hard radical’ Left said he was.” Sanders is a warmonger, not merely by association, but by virtue of his own positions. He favors more sanctions against Russia, in addition to the sanctions levied against Moscow in 2014 and 2016 for its measured response to the U.S-backed fascist coup against a democratically elected government in Ukraine. Rather than surrender to U.S. bullying, Russia came to the military aid of the sovereign and internationally recognized government of Syria in 2015, upsetting the U.S. game plan for an Islamic jihadist victory.

Back in April of this year, on NBC’s Meet The Press, Sanders purposely mimicked “The Godfather” when asked what he would do to force the Russians “to the table” in Syria:

“I think you may want to make them an offer they can’t refuse. And that means tightening the screws on them, dealing with sanctions, telling them that we need their help, they have got to come to the table and not maintain this horrific dictator.”

Of course, it is the United States that has sabotaged every international agreement to rein in its jihadist mercenaries in Syria.

Sanders is a regime-changer, which means he thinks the U.S., in combination with self-selected allies, is above international law, i.e., “exceptional.”

“We’ve got to work with countries around the world for a political solution to get rid of this guy [Syrian President Bashar al-Assad] and to finally bring peace and stability to this country, which has been so decimated.”

During the 2016 campaign, Sanders urged the U.S. to stop acting unilaterally in the region, but instead to collaborate with Syria’s Arab neighbors?as if the funding and training of jihadist fighters had not been a joint effort with Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf monarchies, all along.

According to Politico, “As late as 2002,” Sanders’ campaign website declared that “the defense budget should be cut by 50 percent over the next five years.” But all the defense-cutting air went out of his chest after Bush invaded Iraq. Nowadays, Sanders limits himself to the usual noises about Pentagon “waste,” but has no principled position against the imperial mission of the United States. “We need a strong military, it is a dangerous world,” Sanders told voters in Iowa, during the campaign.

Like Paul Street said, he’s an “imperialist ... Democratic Party company man.”

At last weekend’s People’s Summit, in Chicago, National Nurses United executive director RoseAnn DeMoro endorsed Sanders for a mission he finds impossible to accept: a run for president in 2020 on the Peoples Party ticket. Sanders already had his chance to run as a Green, and refused. He is now the second most important Democrat in the country, behind the ultra-corrupt Bill-Hillary Clinton machine?and by far the most popular. On top of that, Sanders loves being the hero of the phony left, the guy who gimmick-seeking left-liberals hope will create an instant national party for them, making it unnecessary to build a real anti-war, pro-people party from scratch to go heads up with the two corporate machines.

Sanders doesn’t even have to exert himself to string the Peoples Party folks along; they eagerly delude themselves. However, a Sanders-led Party would still be an imperialist, pro-war party.

The U.S. does need a social democratic party, but it must be anti-war. Otherwise, it commits a fraud on social democracy. The United States is the imperial superpower, the main military aggressor on the planet. Its rulers must be deprived of the political ability to spend trillions on war, and to kill millions, or they will always use the “necessity” of war to enforce austerity. The “left” domestic project will fail.

For those of us from the Black Radical Tradition, anti-imperialism is central. Solidarity with the victims of U.S. imperialism is non-negotiable, and we can make no common cause with U.S. political actors that treat war as a political side show, an “elective” issue that is separate from domestic social justice. This is not just a matter of principle, but also of practical politics. “Left” imperialism isn’t just evil. It is self-defeating and stupid.

Black Agenda Report executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

California Blames Incarcerated Slave Laborers for Unsafe Conditions and Amputations

by Spencer Woodman
The Intercept

IN SEPTEMBER, AFTER months of organizing via smuggled cellphones and outside go-betweens, prisoners across the country launched a nationwide strike to demand better working conditions at the numerous facilities that employ inmate labor for little or no pay.

The strike, which spread to dozens of institutions in 22 states, briefly called attention to a fact about prison labor that is well-understood in America’s penal institutions but scarcely known to the general public: Inmates in America’s state prisons — who make everything from license plates to college diploma covers — are not only excluded from the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition on slave labor, but also exist largely outside the reach of federal safety regulations meant to ensure that Americans are not injured or killed on the job. Excluded from the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s mandate of protecting American workers, these inmates lack some of the most basic labor protections other workers take for granted.

This vacuum of oversight causes the labor performed behind prison walls to be doubly invisible because it excludes inmates from federal record-keeping rules requiring non-prison employers to report serious job-site injuries to the federal government.

Yet injury logs generated by the California Prison Industry Authority (CALPIA) — the agency in charge of overseeing the prison work programs in the country’s second largest prison system — provide a rare window into the varied dangers that face inmate laborers. Since 2012, inmates in California have reported more than 600 injuries while working for as little as a 35 cents an hour, according to the documents obtained by The Intercept. The logs contain a wide range of job-site harms, from fingers being smashed in steel molds or sucked under sewing machine needles to less serious maladies like carpel tunnel syndrome and other common overuse conditions.

In some severe cases, inmates’ appendages were amputated after being crushed or severed in machinery. “[The inmate’s] sleeve became caught in gear and pulled hand into assembly,” one log reads, “resulting in amputation of r. hand.”

California generally pays its some 7,000 inmate workers between 35 and 95 cents an hour for their labor, and it is unclear whether any of the inmates listed as having lost appendages while working in California prisons have yet received any compensation for the amputations. A CALPIA spokesperson told The Intercept that the state had provided each of the inmate amputees with workers’ compensation forms, but the injured prisoners could take no action to pursue their claims until released from prison. California state law prohibits inmates from receiving workers’ compensation while still incarcerated, meaning that inmates serving life without parole sentences would never be entitled to a penny of compensation even for losing limbs on the job.

A common theme running among throughout the logs is the potential for many of the injuries to have been averted. “I did not really see anything in here that wouldn’t have been preventable,” said Linda Delp, the director of University of California Los Angeles’s Labor Occupational Safety and Health program, who reviewed the injury logs. Delp said that entries in the CALPIA logs conform to patterns she has seen on non-prison worksites where there is too little training of workers or where the employees are impelled to cut corners because management is requiring too much work to be done in too little time — or both.

A variety of recurring and preventable injury-types caught Delp’s attention. For instance, repeated entries describe objects becoming lodged in inmates’ eyes while they use industrial grinders. A possible solution, according to Delp, would be to ensure that inmate workers wear appropriate safety goggles or visors and have adequate training. Many other logs involve workers losing control of unwieldy objects, which then fall on workers, causing injuries in which body parts are strained, crushed, or lacerated. A solution to this, said Delp, would be to make sure inmates have enough help lifting and maneuvering heavy objects. There are also recurring cases where workers’ fingers become stitched through under sewing machine needles, or have their hands pulled into moving parts on sanders or other machinery — all of which could be prevented by proper machine guarding mechanisms and training, Delp said.

“In looking at these,” Delp said, “there’s something going on in terms of not providing the training and equipment that they need.”

Michele Kane, a CALPIA spokesperson told The Intercept that the office reports all inmate injuries to the state’s department of labor. “They implement and enforce safety regulations over all employers in California,” Kane said, “including state agencies such as CALPIA.”  In response to questions from The Intercept regarding the potential preventability of injuries, a CALPIA spokesperson assigned workers responsibility for their injuries. “In spite of training and proper safety equipment provided by CALPIA,” Kane said in a statement, “there are times when inmates violate training protocols.”

While Delp cannot say anything for certain about CALPIA management practices by reviewing the logs alone, she took notice of the agency’s tendency to blame workers for their injuries.

“I always look for how these things are described and whether individual workers are blamed for what happened,” Delp said. “What’s fairly common across different types of jobs is for management to look the other way when people are breaking the safety rules because they want them to work faster, until someone gets hurt. And then that person is blamed for not following the safety rules.”

A typical example of CALPIA’s allocation of blame appears in one of the several logs that describe an incident resulting in an inmate suffering an amputation, in this case, a finger in garment machinery at the California Men’s Colony prison in San Luis Obispo County in April 2014. “While inmate was cutting fabric, inmate removed his glove to adjust machine, and failed to put his glove back prior to operating the machine,” the log reads, adding no additional information other aside from its result: amputation of “Finger(s)/Thumb(s).”

Top photo: James Dickert, age 68, sews socks together in a prison factory at California Men’s Colony prison on December 19, 2013 in San Luis Obispo, California.

The Price of a Life

by Ariel Levy
The New Yorker

What’s the right way to compensate someone for decades of lost freedom?

As teen-agers on Long Island, John Restivo and Marge Neidecker spent hours in her blue Road Runner, cruising around the towns where Queens gives way to Nassau County. “We did a lot of drag racing,” Neidecker remembered. “I owned a souped-up car—so did everybody back in the seventies.” She had long, straight blond hair parted down the middle, like Joni Mitchell’s. Restivo was a tall, gangly guy; his nickname in the neighborhood was Wimpy. Sometimes they cut class at Lynbrook High School and rode around together, smoking cigarettes and listening to Bob Dylan. They loved his song “Hurricane,” and sang along as they drove: “Here comes the story of the Hurricane / the man the authorities came to blame / for something that he never done.” It seemed like a metaphor for all the injustices of adolescence.

After high school, they went their separate ways. In Neidecker’s yearbook, Restivo wrote, “Best of luck with the future.” She married at nineteen. He went to work for his father, a retired police officer, at the family’s moving-and-storage company. The Restivos were a close family: every Sunday they had dinner together, with as many as twenty relatives at the table.

When Restivo was twenty-four, his father died, of a heart attack. A year later, his girlfriend gave birth to their son. Suddenly, Restivo was the father of an infant and the oldest of three brothers in a business that had relied heavily on the family patriarch. He was overwhelmed, always tense. One day in March, 1985, he was driving in Oceanside, about to make a left onto Rockaway Avenue, to check on some of the company’s trucks. Three unmarked cars drove up next to him. The men inside said that they were cops, and told Restivo to pull over to the curb.

He was taken to the county-police headquarters, in Mineola, where Joseph Volpe, a beefy detective with bushy eyebrows, told him that they were investigating a homicide. Restivo’s first thought was that his girlfriend and their new baby had been murdered. But that wasn’t it. The body of a sixteen-year-old named Theresa Fusco had been found in the woods near the Hot Skates roller rink, where she’d worked at the snack bar; she had been raped, and strangled with a rope. Though Restivo had never met the victim and had no criminal record, it became clear that he was a suspect. One of the detectives grabbed him by the throat, he recalled recently. “He starts screaming, right in my face, ‘Is this how you killed her?’ And I’m, like, This is insane.” They kept him at the station for twenty hours, during which he was not allowed to rest or eat or call his girlfriend and let her know where he was. Restivo remembers that when he said he had a right to a lawyer, Volpe told him, “This is un-America: you have no rights here.” Then Volpe’s partner, Robert Dempsey, hit him in the face.

Restivo had grown up thinking of the police as good guys—his father had spent twenty years on the Nassau County force—and he was stunned by his treatment. As soon as he was released, he went to see a lawyer, who took photographs of his bruises and filed a complaint against the detectives. (Dempsey denied hitting Restivo.) But the police did not relinquish the case. “It’s quite possible that the fact that he called a lawyer right away made them think that he was guilty,” Anna Benvenutti Hoffmann, one of Restivo’s current lawyers, said. “Anything is a sign that you’re guilty, once they get a feeling that they don’t like something about somebody.”

Restivo’s phones were tapped. His home was bugged. “Everywhere I went, they started following me around,” he said. “I’m trying to continue running a business, and if I go to somebody’s house to do an estimate or a moving job, I’m afraid the cops are going to show up. Anybody I associated with, they’re starting to snatch off the street—and they’re not just bringing them in for a half-hour chat.” On the night of the crime, Restivo had been in Wantagh, sanding floors at his new house with a friend; the police brought the friend in and questioned him for ten hours. “They told me, ‘We’re going to turn your life into an effing nightmare,’ ” Restivo said. “ ‘And we’re going to turn your brother’s life into an effing nightmare. We’ll turn your mother’s life into a nightmare. We’ll turn your son’s life into a nightmare.’ And they did.”

There was a mounting sense of menace in Lynbrook and Oceanside at the time: Theresa Fusco was not the only teen-age girl to disappear from the area. Her friend Kelly Morrissey, a fifteen-year-old with winged hair and a giddy grin, had vanished the previous June; she was last seen on her way to the Captain Video arcade. The police had listed Morrissey as a runaway, though before she went missing she had laid out an outfit for the next day on her bed. They likewise assumed that Fusco had fled in protest after she was fired from Hot Skates, but her mother, Connie Napoli, insisted that her daughter had been abducted. “Police should trust a mother’s feelings,” Napoli said at the time. “It is so frustrating knowing your child is somewhere needing help, and you don’t know where to go.” When some children found Fusco’s naked body covered with leaves in the woods by the railroad tracks, people in the neighborhood began to panic. Then, a few months later, a nineteen-year-old named Jacqueline Martarella disappeared in Oceanside on her way to Burger King. Her body was found on a golf course; like Fusco, she had apparently been raped and strangled. There was enormous pressure on the police to find a culprit.

Volpe was an experienced member of the Nassau County force, but this was his first case as the lead detective on a homicide. There was no DNA testing available at that time, so even though the police took vaginal swabs from Fusco to ascertain that she’d been raped, they were unable to identify her assailant based on the semen they recovered. In January of 1985, after several months of investigation, Volpe heard that a local man—a veteran who suffered from P.T.S.D. and had been hospitalized for psychiatric illness—had been bragging that he knew who did it. He named John Restivo.

After the police brought Restivo in for questioning, Volpe began to build his case. During his interrogation, Restivo had mentioned an employee, a twenty-one-year-old named John Kogut. The police picked up Kogut after he had just finished a day of intense physical labor and then drunk a few beers and smoked a joint. Despite his insobriety, Kogut passed a polygraph test in which he insisted that he knew nothing about the crime. But the police told him that he had failed, and interrogated him for eighteen hours—by the end of which he had given six distinct, contradictory confessions. The last one was handwritten by one of the detectives. Kogut signed it, and then, sitting before a video camera, confessed to the crime, hewing to the police’s version of events: He had gone out with Restivo and his friend Dennis Halstead, a thirty-year-old father of five, who sometimes worked with them at the moving company. In Restivo’s van, the three men had picked Fusco up from the street and taken her to a cemetery. There, among the headstones, Halstead and Restivo had raped her and then persuaded Kogut to strangle her with a rope.

Kogut recanted his confession almost immediately. Restivo’s van had been up on blocks at his mother’s house on the night of the crime, and, anyway, the three men had never ridden in it together—Kogut and Halstead couldn’t stand each other. But it didn’t matter. The police impounded Restivo’s van, and on June 20, 1985, he and Halstead were arrested.

Dennis Halstead’s son Jason said that, before his father was taken in, “I wanted to be with him all the time. He was my hero.” When the police came to arrest Halstead, he and Jason were fishing off the Woodmere docks; Jason, who was twelve, had gone to check the lines. “When I turned back to yell at my dad we caught something, I saw him talking to two men in suits with police surrounding him,” Jason said. “All I heard him say was ‘I can’t believe you guys have the balls to do this.’ ” Dennis Halstead described the moment when Volpe approached him. “Jason looked at me,” he said. “I told him that everything would be O.K. And I told them, ‘Please don’t cuff me in front of my son.’ ”

Restivo was less self-possessed. When he was taken to jail, he said, “I was frightened of being sexually assaulted; I was frightened of being assaulted physically”—which he was, half a dozen times. “I was scared to death.” Bail was set at seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and he didn’t have the money, so he remained in jail for more than a year awaiting trial. “I can still remember that cell door clanging shut behind me,” he said. His lawyer warned him not to interact with anyone, because anything he said might be used against him. “Dudes would come tell me they’d be taken from the bullpen and brought up to the D.A.’s office, and they were told, ‘Listen, you’ve got this guy Restivo on your gallery. You tell us that he confessed to you, you’re out of there.’ ” He felt increasingly doomed. But some part of him believed this couldn’t continue much longer, that any day he would have his old life back.

During that time, Restivo’s girlfriend wrote him letters in the voice of their infant son: “I really miss you, Daddy. But you got to hang in there. We will clear up this whole mess. When you feel depressed, just think of coming home and playing with me.” By the time Restivo went to trial, in October, 1986, he had lost thirty pounds.

The prosecution’s case rested heavily on Volpe’s report to the district attorney, which noted a significant piece of evidence recovered from Restivo’s van: two strands of hair found on the floor which appeared to have come from Fusco’s head. Restivo’s lawyer argued that the police had submitted tainted evidence, but the prosecution was unfazed. (Fred Klein, the assistant district attorney assigned to the case, described Volpe to me as “a wonderful detective—one of the most tenacious, professional people I have ever worked with.”) Several jailhouse informants claimed to have heard Restivo bragging about raping the girl, and a friend recalled hearing him say, “She probably deserved it.” On the stand, Restivo disavowed the comment, saying, “It was a very insensitive remark, but I didn’t mean anything by it.” Klein held up a photograph of Fusco’s body and yelled in Restivo’s face, “What did she deserve?”

The men were found guilty. Restivo remembers hearing his mother, Frida, screaming in the back of the courtroom as the judge announced the verdict. He was sentenced to thirty-three years to life. Before he was led away in handcuffs, he read aloud an eighteen-page letter. “Each defendant in this case was offered a deal by the D.A. I myself was offered three to nine to ‘coöperate.’ But I have no knowledge of this crime and would not lie to try to protect myself,” he said. “If I must spend the rest of my life in prison for something I didn’t do, at least I’ll be able to sleep at night.”

“I haven’t slept through the night in thirty years,” Restivo said one afternoon, sitting on his back deck, near the Indian River Lagoon, in central Florida. It was a few days before New Year’s, and there were still Christmas bulbs shining in the palm fronds throughout the neighborhood. Restivo has lived there, in a little blue house, since he was released from prison, in 2003. He and Dennis Halstead were exonerated, with the help of DNA evidence, after serving eighteen years.

Restivo was wearing a T-shirt that said “What a Long Strange Trip It’s Been.” He is starting to go bald, and he has a silver mustache and dark purple circles under his eyes. In prison, he was often awakened by the sounds of other inmates fighting, or of rats skittering across the floor of his cell. Now he has terrible nightmares, and gets about three hours of sleep a night. Prison was “like a war zone,” he said. “Any day could be your day. With the prison gangs, to become a member in good standing you’ve got to go up to someone and”—he mimed slicing his cheek—“hit ’em with a razor. You feel—or, at least, I did—safest locked in your own cell.” He went back and forth between Green Haven prison and Clinton, not registering much difference. “It doesn’t matter where you are,” Restivo said. “If you’re going to be victimized, you’re going to be victimized.” Restivo survived because he’s big, and because he kept to himself.

Even before he was convicted, he started writing letters, “to anybody, any name I could come up with,” pleading his innocence, asking for help. In prison, he got a job in the law library, so that he could research his case. “I had a typewriter in my cell that had a seven-thousand-character memory,” he said. “When I understood what the enemy had access to—I mean, I didn’t know there was Lexis and all these things! They had spell check. I was using a dictionary.”

In 1985, when he went in, Restivo was a frightened twenty-six-year-old. When he was released, he was forty-four: middle-aged, with no real résumé, severe P.T.S.D., and a sense of bafflement about “why everybody was walking around holding their heads like they had an earache.” (Restivo was incarcerated before the advent of the cell phone.) Soon after his release, he went to Florida to help his old friend Marge Neidecker rebuild her house, after the collapse of her marriage. He never left.

Restivo and Neidecker live modestly, on the salary from her job at the local post office. In 2010, he received a $2.2-million settlement from the State of New York, but much of that went to lawyers and to his mother, who for two decades had spent everything she could spare on his case, at one point putting up her house as bond. Restivo tries to live as if that settlement were the last money he will ever have. “When they handed me that check, I’m not thinking, Ah, I’m rich!” he said. “I’m not eligible for Medicaid. I’m not eligible for Social Security. I never put money in a 401(k). That money has to last me forever.”

But in April, 2014, a jury in Islip awarded Restivo eighteen million dollars in damages—effectively, a million for each year of his imprisonment. Nassau County is appealing the ruling, so the money will likely take years to materialize, if it comes at all. “I’ve been through too much in this world to think anything’s a given,” Restivo said. “I can’t start living off that money. Then I put myself in a hole and I’m screwed for the rest of my life.” His expenses are minimal: “I could live on the beach.” But he was concerned about his mother. He had just returned from spending several months repairing her house in Lynbrook, and she was in poor health. “These are my wishes—to know that she’s taken care of,” he said.

Restivo often worries about other people, even people he barely knows. He doesn’t say goodbye before he hangs up the phone; he says, “Stay out of trouble.” When I went to see him, he was concerned that I’d get lost in the orange groves on the way to his house. In prison, he trained to become a registered H.I.V. counsellor and volunteered in the psychiatric unit. “All of these guys had different issues, and they couldn’t function in the general population,” Restivo said. “I would go up there three or four days a week and teach them basic math, basic reading skills. Sometimes basic life skills.” He worries about Dennis Halstead’s children, who Jason Halstead said have come to think of him as “a second father.”

Restivo also worries about his own son, whom he has not seen since 1986. His girlfriend brought the baby to visit him in jail, and told Restivo that she had a new boyfriend and was moving out of state. “That was the last time I seen the kid,” Restivo said. In 1988, she asked him to sign away his paternal rights, so that her husband could adopt the baby. Restivo considered the options. The boy could grow up with a man who he thought was his father, or he could grow up believing that his real father was in prison for no reason—or, worse, that he was a murderer. He sent a letter assenting to the adoption, and added a request: “You can do me one thing, send me a photo of him.”

At the trial for damages last year, Marge Neidecker testified that she hears Restivo cry whenever he takes a shower, and that he showers three or four times a day.

One of the earliest arguments for financial compensation for the wrongly incarcerated came in 1932, from the Yale law professor Edwin Borchard. In an influential book called “Convicting the Innocent: Sixty-five Actual Errors of Criminal Justice,” Borchard wrote, “When it is discovered after conviction that the wrong man was condemned, the least the State can do to right this essentially irreparable injury is to reimburse the innocent victim, by an appropriate indemnity for the loss and damage suffered.” He noted, “European countries have long recognized that such indemnity is a public obligation.” But it would be many years before the United States began puzzling through what constituted an “appropriate indemnity.” It wasn’t until the first DNA exoneration, in 1989, that most states began to seriously consider compensation.

There is still no consensus about the value of lost time. Missouri gives exonerees fifty dollars a day for time served, California twice that much. Massachusetts caps total compensation at half a million dollars. In Maine, the limit is three hundred thousand; in Florida, it’s two million. The variation is largely arbitrary. “If there’s a logic to it, I haven’t seen it,” Robert J. Norris, a researcher at SUNY Albany who has studied compensation statutes, told me. In Wisconsin, no matter how long an exoneree has served, the state will pay no more than twenty-five thousand dollars—the same figure that its legislators established in 1979. “They just never changed it,” Norris said. “They even amended their statute in 1987, but they didn’t change the amount.” Most states levy taxes on payment. Twenty states have no compensation statutes at all.

Fifteen hundred and seventy-five people have been exonerated in the U.S. The best off are those whom Brandon Garrett, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law who has written extensively on post-conviction litigation, describes as “the ones that win the tort lottery.” These are exonerees who seek compensation through the courts, arguing that their fundamental civil rights were violated by the police or by prosecutors. (The same legal principle is at issue in federal suits brought by people who have been shot by the police.) In such cases, the potential damages are unlimited. But the standard of proof is high. “Police officers have qualified immunity,” Garrett told me. “They can violate your constitutional rights—reasonably but not egregiously.”

One of the major obstacles to filing these suits is that plaintiffs don’t have access to law-enforcement records—which typically contain the best evidence of misconduct. A federal civil-rights suit, Garrett said, provides “the Mercedes-Benz of discovery: seven-hour depositions with the key witnesses, all the police files, all the prosecutor’s files.” But that material can be obtained only after a suit has been launched. “It’s a Catch-22,” Garrett continued. “You can’t file a lawsuit without evidence to support your claim, and you can’t necessarily get at that evidence without the kind of discovery available to you only from a federal civil-rights case. One of the hardest things I had to do in practice is explain to an exoneree why we can’t file.”

In 1988, a year into his sentence, Restivo read in the law library about a case in which a felon was convicted on the basis of DNA evidence. “I figured, if they’re doing this to convict somebody, they’re going to have to do this to let me out,” he said. At his urging, his lawyer filed a motion requesting DNA testing on the vaginal swabs from the original investigation. That motion was denied, and Restivo’s lawyer had to petition for another five years before it was granted. “We had DNA tests done in ’93, ’94, and ’95, by three different labs,” Restivo said. “The first test was inconclusive; the second and third tests excluded all three of us.” But it wasn’t enough. “They argued in court that these tests weren’t reliable,” he told me, his voice rising. “Wait a minute—it would be a billion-to-one shot that both of these tests were wrong!” Nassau County argued that the swabs had been partially consumed by previous serological tests and that the incriminating DNA could have been removed.

As DNA testing began to draw attention to the incidence of wrongful conviction in the United States—which has been estimated at as high as five per cent—an “innocence movement” coalesced, devoted to uncovering its causes and freeing its victims. In 1992, the attorneys Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld founded the Innocence Project, the most prominent legal organization devoted to DNA exoneration. The tests revealed deep flaws in a variety of law-enforcement practices and assumptions—mistaken eyewitness identification, for instance, has been shown to contribute to seventy per cent of wrongful convictions. (At the time, Scheck told me that the way police lineups were conducted would one day be considered as reliable as witch trials.) In about half of the three hundred and twenty-nine DNA-exoneration cases since then, improper forensics have played a role; twenty-seven per cent have involved false confessions, and fifteen per cent have involved unreliable informants. All these factors were at play in the convictions of Restivo, Halstead, and Kogut.

In 2002, the Innocence Project assigned a young lawyer named Nina Morrison to Restivo’s case, and, after a year of work, she made the decisive breakthrough. It happened by accident, one afternoon when Morrison was visiting the police department in Mineola. “I had gone with a couple lawyers to look at crime-scene photographs,” she said. “And then, as we’re going through the boxes, the prosecutor and I pulled out an envelope, and it’s marked ‘vaginal swabs.’ And you’re, like, Oh—look at that.” In the envelope was an intact swab, the final piece of evidence that they needed to have the original convictions vacated. On June 11, 2003, the three men were released from prison.

Klein, the prosecutor in the initial trial, told me, “The first feeling is, there must be something wrong with the test—it can’t be. These people were properly convicted. At that point, it becomes: What did we miss? What other evidence is there?” Kogut was forced to go back to trial, largely because he had confessed, and in court Nassau County’s case began to look suspicious. DNA testing confirmed that the strands of hair Detective Volpe claimed to have discovered in Restivo’s van belonged to Theresa Fusco. But they displayed a marker of decomposition called “postmortem root banding,” which occurs only many hours after death, and forensic evidence showed that Fusco’s body had been left in the woods soon after she was murdered. What’s more, the hairs were pristine, free of the debris and the damage from trampling that marked other stray hairs found in Restivo’s van. The judge concluded that they must have come from elsewhere, perhaps from the autopsy; apparently the police had commingled them—accidentally or deliberately—with hairs from the van. On December 21, 2005, Kogut was acquitted.

Kogut’s trial had stretched on for two years, while Restivo worried constantly that he, too, would be retried. “If a police officer drove down the street for any reason, he called me in a panic that they were canvassing his neighborhood and somebody was going to fabricate a statement and say that he admitted to murder,” Morrison said. “It’s not atypical for clients to have irrational fears that people are following them, tapping their phones, after their release. In John’s case, I couldn’t tell him that it wasn’t true, because they had done it the first time.” After Kogut was acquitted, the prosecution declined to retry Halstead and Restivo. “Once the case was really over, he was a lot more free—legally and mentally,” Morrison said.

But the case remained the focus of Restivo’s life. “If I wasn’t reading documents, if I was just laying back keeping my fingers crossed, it’d be different,” he said. “But my mind is always going.” In 2007, he sued the State of New York, and settled out of court for $2.2 million. Along with Kogut and Halstead, he also filed a federal civil-rights suit against Nassau County. Given access to the police files, Restivo learned how Volpe had built the case against him. In order to open a wiretap on Restivo’s phone, Volpe had reported that the hairs belonged to Fusco before a lab had time to analyze them, and had claimed that there was “possible human blood” in the van, even though a serologist told him that there was none. Restivo also learned that Volpe had abandoned a promising lead in order to focus on him. The night that Fusco was last seen, wearing a pair of striped jeans, a tan Oldsmobile went missing, less than a mile away. A week later, the car was found, with the windshield smashed and the license plates changed. After Fusco’s body was discovered, the car’s owner heard about the case on the news. He went to the police and told them that he had noticed a pair of unfamiliar striped jeans wadded under the passenger seat, and that a length of rope was missing from the vehicle. Volpe searched the car and took statements from witnesses. But he did not mention the car or the striped jeans or the rope in his report to the district attorney’s office.

Fred Klein, who was an assistant district attorney for twenty-seven years and is now a professor at Hofstra Law School, said that the idea that the police had manipulated the evidence “intentionally would just be beyond my comprehension.” The jury was similarly skeptical. In 2012, Restivo and the other men lost their case, and found themselves vilified again. “Our police department has been vindicated,” Nassau County’s attorney*, John Ciampoli, announced at a press conference afterward. Even though the three had been exonerated, Ciampoli insisted that they were “criminals,” who were somehow “responsible for what happened to Theresa Fusco.” He concluded that they had “been denied a chance to turn what, in my opinion, is a heinous crime into a payday that would cripple Nassau County.”

Compensation is intended in part as a deterrent: a municipality that has to pay heavily for police or prosecutorial misconduct ought to be less likely to allow it to happen again. But it is taxpayers, not police or prosecutors, who bear the costs of litigation and compensation. Prosecutors enjoy almost total immunity in cases of misconduct, even if they deliberately withhold exculpatory evidence from a jury. A 2011 Supreme Court ruling also made it virtually impossible to sue a prosecutor’s office for such violations. And, unless there is a civil-rights trial, there is no examination of the police practices that contributed to a wrongful conviction: it is seen simply as collateral damage in the fight against crime. (North Carolina is the only state with an alternative; in 2006, it set up the Innocence Inquiry Commission to review claims of innocence outside the appellate-court process.) Klein pointed out that prosecutors in many states are already bound by ethics statutes. But, he added, “practically speaking, most prosecutors don’t spend too much time worrying about that. They assume that the police did their job.”

The other reason for awarding money is, of course, to compensate for a harm committed by the state. Some of that harm is purely financial: a person who has spent decades in prison, rather than developing a career, can emerge at forty-five and find herself eligible for the same jobs that she was eligible for at twenty-two. “I fill out applications for the dollar store, for CVS,” an exoneree named Cathy Watkins told me recently. Watkins spent eighteen years in prison for the shooting of a cabdriver in the Bronx, which was later found to have been committed by members of a narcotics-trafficking gang called Sex Money Murder. She has been out for two and a half years, without any compensation, and she finds the process of seeking employment in a digital world confounding. “ ‘Upload your résumé online’—well, how do you do that?” she said. Had she been free to pursue a career, Watkins was sure she’d have built up a pension or savings. Instead, she is dependent on the generosity of others, a position that she finds compromising and unjust. “I worked for eighteen years!” she said. “Slave labor. It was prison—you have to do these things.”

People who spend many years in institutions tend to develop an overwhelming sense of helplessness. (This holds whether they are guilty or innocent—and, indeed, whether the institution is a prison or a mental hospital.) Watkins, like many other exonerees, told me, “I feel like a newborn baby.” She wished that she had some help navigating the world; the guilty, at least, had parole officers. “I want someone to take me by the hand and say, ‘O.K., Cathy, I’m going to show you how to do this. This was our mistake. Let us help you.’ ”

But many exonerated people are excluded from the system that supports other former convicts. “There are lots of programs designed for ex-offenders, to help them get past substance abuse, anger issues, to help them reintegrate and avoid recidivism,” Karen Daniel, the director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions, at Northwestern University’s School of Law, said. “There is nothing really like that in place for exonerees.” There are rarely enough of them in a given place to justify a program—and they may be loath to spend more time in settings that equate them with criminals. “But their needs are enormous,” Daniel continued. “They often have P.T.S.D. and need psychological services. They need to be shown how to use public transportation. There’s adjustment to family; there’s accepting that not everybody believes that you were wrongly convicted.”

Only five states provide exonerees with mental-health services or medical treatment—and, after years of substandard care, many former inmates have health problems. Only four offer job-placement assistance. Texas has what many regard as the most thoughtful statute. (Not coincidentally, it is also the state with the most DNA exonerations.) A person who is exonerated in Texas has access to health insurance, free tuition at any state university, and a year of free counselling. He is eligible for a monthly annuity, as well as a payout of eighty thousand dollars for each year of incarceration, without having to file suit. So there is a relatively short period when he has no job, no home, no vehicle, no professional connections, and no money—and is thus dependent on his family for everything, as though he were a child.

“When you get out, it’s like you are new—you don’t know anything,” Richard Miles, who was incarcerated for fifteen years in Texas because of false eyewitness testimony, said. When he went in, he was nineteen years old and very naïve. “All I did growing up was go to church and school,” he told me. “Getting locked up in prison was a scary situation: they’re taking you someplace where you only read about it or see it on TV. You don’t really know how to respond to a place like that.” But when he came out, at thirty-four, he didn’t know how to respond to anything else. “You’ve been isolated, so a lot of the social skills that people rely on every day, you didn’t have those.”

Miles had received $1.2 million in compensation, and I asked him if it had been sufficient. “Me, personally, it didn’t matter how much the amount was,” he said. “It didn’t give me back anything that I lost.”

One morning this fall, twenty exonerees wearing T-shirts that said “I didn’t do it” filled the headquarters of Centurion Ministries, in a drab office park in Princeton, New Jersey. Centurion is a tiny organization, with only ten people on staff, which seeks to free the wrongly incarcerated. One of its chief investigators, a rumpled eighty-two-year-old retired math teacher named Richard Hepburn, recently finished a case that required him to go to Montana fifty-five times and knock on doors. “How lucky am I—at my age!—to have this kind of excitement?” he said.

Centurion’s investigators spend an average of two decades on a case. They have succeeded fifty-three times. On a wall in the office, they keep a black felt board with the names of people whose cases they’re pursuing, and that morning they were ceremonially removing Mark Schand’s and Milton Scarborough’s. The two men had served a combined sixty-three years in prison, and, later that afternoon, Centurion was throwing a “freedom party” for them, in the ballroom of the local Marriott hotel.

Schand, a fifty-year-old African-American, was convicted of a murder in Massachusetts, even though six witnesses—including his pregnant wife, Mia—placed him at her beauty salon, in Hartford, Connecticut, at the time. The assistant district attorney who prosecuted the case, Francis Bloom, has since been publicly censured for fabricating a confession and forging signatures in another case; he is now working as a personal-injury lawyer. “If these D.A.s were led away from their families like we’re led away from ours, wrongful convictions would come to a screaming halt,” Schand said.

Every Tuesday for twenty-seven years, Mia Schand drove five hours to see her husband in prison. At the ceremony that morning, she was alternately smiling and crying, standing with Schand’s three sons, whom she had raised in his absence. During his decades away from the family, Schand said, “I just wanted to get back to my babies.” After he took his name off the board, his children—little boys when Schand left, now tall, handsome young men—lifted him up on their shoulders, and everyone hollered and clapped.

Scarborough, a seventy-five-year-old white man, sat stoop-shouldered and smiling in a wheelchair. When he was thirty-seven, he went on trial, along with two other men, for murdering a family in central Pennsylvania. He was convicted based on the testimony of three drug addicts, all of whom later said that investigators gave them leniency in exchange for false testimony. (“I remember telling the police, ‘Tell me what you want me to say and I will say it,’ ” one admitted in an affidavit.) Scarborough, walking with a cane, approached the felt board with the help of his niece, who took him in after his release, in 2013. Together, they removed his name, letter by letter. “The prison system, I don’t have much to say about it,” Scarborough said to the group as their applause died down. “Except they don’t feed you too good.” Everyone laughed, and many of the men nodded. The state never formally acknowledged Scarborough’s innocence; instead, it offered a deal, in which he agreed to drop his appeals in exchange for having his sentence commuted. As a result, he will never receive any compensation. He would be homeless if not for his niece.

Centurion worked on Restivo’s case for nearly a decade before the Innocence Project got involved, and he is a fixture at their events now. Late that night, after the freedom party died down, people gathered at a bar. Restivo, who had changed into a burgundy T-shirt with a picture of a fish skeleton above the words “Fillet and Release,” sat at a tall cocktail table, drinking vodka and talking about relationships with a fellow-exoneree named Frank O’Connell, who had served twenty-seven years for murder. “I missed out on companionship; I missed out on all that crap,” O’Connell, a tall, blue-eyed man who was once a high-school football star, said. “I just meet you. Do I tell you I’m an exoneree? That I was in prison? Or do I want you to like me for me—as a father, as a hard worker? So I’m not going to tell you I was locked up. But I don’t know about real estate. You bought homes and stuff. You had a new car with financing—I can’t tell you about that.” He gestured at Restivo. “That’s the kind of thing only we would feel. There’s that gap in life of what we lost.”

Restivo described another problem that the men shared: “I go in, I’m in my twenties. I come out, I’m forty-four, but I’m still looking at girls who are twenty-six!” I suggested that he had that in common with most forty-four-year-old men, whether or not they’d been imprisoned. The exonerees all insisted that it was different. O’Connell, who is fifty-seven, complained that “most of the women my age, they’ve had their fun,” and were only looking for a husband. But he didn’t love the alternative: “When I’m single and I’m alone, I feel isolated—I feel like I’m in the hole! I got a TV, I got a phone, but I’m in the hole!”

Since being released, in 2012, O’Connell has been preparing a civil-rights suit against Los Angeles County. “I made it clear: we’re not playing the two-, three-million-dollar game,” he said. “I will accept twelve million with a public apology, or fourteen million with a private apology to me and my family, or eighteen million with no apology whatsoever. Otherwise, we’re going to trial.” For Los Angeles County to acknowledge that O’Connell was framed for murder would be worth six million dollars, then. “It’s not about the money. It’s the spanking,” he said. “I want them to take responsibility. I have to take responsibility if I speed in my car. What’s the difference? If they would say, ‘I was wrong, and I’m sorry,’ I would say, ‘I forgive you.’ ”

Even as O’Connell specified what he wanted in the way of recompense, his tone was laid-back, Californian. (He’d had a breakthrough while he was in prison, he said, after reading the work of the self-help author Eckhart Tolle.) “We learn when we’re in there that all that anger does no good,” O’Connell said. “You can’t change what happened to you. You understand, hey, they’re dirty. It’s not just the cops. The judges are; the D.A.s are. It’s a game.”

After the failed federal suit, in 2012, Restivo and Halstead went to court again, this time without Kogut and the burden of his false confession. It was a two-part trial. First, they had to establish that Nassau County was liable, which required proving that the police had knowingly deprived them of the right to a fair trial. “You have to re-litigate your innocence,” as the law professor Brandon Garrett put it. Restivo sat through all the old allegations again. “The deposition they put me through was over two days, for fourteen hours,” he said. “These people attacked me and attacked me and attacked me.” Nassau County was the defendant, but that’s not the way it felt.

The trial lasted four weeks, and when it was over Restivo felt—fleetingly—vindicated. “When that jury came back with that verdict sheet and said Volpe planted and withheld evidence? That was accountability,” Restivo said. “And that’s the only accountability I’m ever going to get.” Volpe received a commendation for his work in the Fusco trial, and retired in 2002 to become a car salesman. By then, the state had settled another case, in which he was accused of soliciting a false confession. He died in 2011. Marge Neidecker told me that it was the happiest day of Restivo’s life.

The second phase of the trial was for damages: the jury was charged with determining the monetary value of the losses that Halstead and Restivo had suffered, which meant that their present pain had to be examined. There was excruciating testimony from Halstead’s children, who talked about being separated from their father. His daughter Melissa—who had talked to him on the phone twice a week for eighteen years—sobbed in the courtroom as he read aloud a letter that she’d written to him when she was eleven years old: “You are not just the best father, you are my best friend.” After his release, Halstead lived with his son Jason and his family. But, ultimately, Jason asked him to leave: Halstead’s drinking was making life difficult. He is living in Tallahassee, and has been in and out of rehab.

Nassau County’s lawyer argued that Halstead would have been damaged anyway: his brother died when he was three, he was sexually assaulted when he was seven, and he was removed from the care of his negligent mother when he was twelve. As the attorney put it, “All of his problems have seeds in the past.” When he questioned Restivo, he emphasized Restivo’s already strained relationship with his girlfriend, implying that he might have lost his son even if he hadn’t gone to prison.

The jurors rejected those arguments. It took them less than two hours to come back with a damage award: thirty-six million dollars. “When they said that number, it was, like, wow,” Restivo said. “Because the jury really got it. It put a real big smile on my mother’s face, because she has been fighting these people for all these years. So it wasn’t about the money. Although it is about the money. I don’t want to say that it isn’t about the money.”

Nina Morrison, of the Innocence Project, told me, “I think for a lot of the clients there’s a sense that this is going to be the thing that helps them move on. But then the jury goes home; we all go home. And then, at the end of the day, they are still left with the enormity of what they’ve lost.”

At the Centurion party, I overheard Michael Austin, a tall black man with a shaved head and a mellow demeanor, tell a recent exoneree, “You are still in prison.” Austin told me later that he had been through the same process; he spent twenty-seven years in a Maryland prison, and then “it took me ten years to feel like I was really, really home again.” He vividly remembers the day he was released. “One of the C.O.s”—corrections officers—“handed me a box with my property, and I started walking away as if I had on shackles. The C.O. said, ‘Mike, why you walking like that?’ I looked down at my ankles and said, ‘Oh, man—you’re right.’ ”

Austin had received $1.4 million in compensation. He knew other exonerees who had received much more money, but he didn’t envy them; he’d seen things end badly. “I know a woman who got fourteen million. She bought her mother a house, her sister a house, herself two houses.” Before long, she had run out of money. It happened frequently, he said. “If you have a family that has been taking care of you while you were incarcerated, your primary objective is to take care of them now.” It was a way of feeling like a person again—an adult, with agency.

Karen Daniel, of Northwestern, told me that money dispersed over time was often more effective than lump sums, for precisely this reason. “I have seen too many clients go through all their money, and then there’s never going to be any more,” she said. “It doesn’t always happen in the expected ways. Some people might make poor choices and buy a fancy car. But, a lot of times, as soon as somebody is seen by relatives and friends as being exonerated, the relatives come out of the woodwork, the hands come out.”

But the families of exonerees have suffered, too. Jason Halstead got a job when he was in high school to pay the phone bills he accumulated calling his father in prison. (Halstead received a $2.2-million settlement from New York State, and gave a third of it to his children.) Richard Miles told me, “I see my sister going through things, my brother going through things. How can I have something they don’t?” To Miles, sharing his compensation seemed like a matter of justice. “They were coming to visit me—all those years, it was like they were locked up, too.”

Money feels, at least initially, like vindication: a jury or a government would not award millions of dollars if it didn’t acknowledge the gravity of the wrong. “If somebody says, Let me give you 1.4 million—or eight million!—you think, Now everybody knows that I was really, really innocent,” Austin said. “And at the moment you have that feeling of complete freedom. But how long does that last?” Ultimately, he felt, it was much more important to have a sense of purpose. When he came home to Baltimore, he got a job counselling troubled kids. “So I’m cool—I got a career,” he said. “When the money came in, I just basically invested it.” After three decades of being trapped, he also decided to have some adventures. “I went to South Africa, Jamaica. I went to Canada.” He’d always wanted to be a singer; he loved the music scene in Durban, and sat in with some bands there.

After Richard Miles was released from prison, he started an organization, Miles of Freedom, to provide services for communities affected by incarceration: a “Freedom Shuttle,” for relatives to visit loved ones in prison; a lawn-care service to employ former inmates. “If you don’t find anything to channel any type of negative thoughts into, you’re going to just be thinking about it all day, every day,” he told me. “You’re just going to be stuck in this victimized state. I was already in a victimized state for fifteen years.” Miles had married since his release, and his wife was pregnant with their first child, a daughter. “I oftentimes say, We’ve all been in prison,” he said. “We imprison ourselves in relationships, in financial bankruptcy—we lock our own selves up. The only difference between my prison and yours is somebody else had the key to my release.”

The years that Austin and Miles spent in prison seemed to have rendered them not bitter or weakened but uncommonly beneficent—a quality that struck me again and again when I met exonerees. “I haven’t known one of them who hasn’t had this moment of transcendence,” Barry Scheck, of the Innocence Project, told me. He had a theory: the wrongly convicted who don’t attain a kind of enlightened surrender are simply unable to survive. “We have lost a lot of clients who could not get past it—just can’t cope, have been literally driven crazy, gotten into fatal fights, committed suicide.” The choice for the wrongly convicted was stark: transcend or die.

Marge Neidecker and John Restivo married in 2009. “I figured I needed him, and he needed me,” Neidecker said one afternoon, when we were eating lunch at a tiki bar on the riverbank near their house. A lean, muscular woman with blond bangs, Neidecker was wearing tight jeans, a black tank top, and glasses that went darker in bright light. When Restivo got out of prison, she, too, was going through a difficult time, and he was “a lifesaver,” she said. “I came home every night and he would have fixed something, or made a great dinner—he knows I work hard.” It was very different from her last relationship. “I’d had enough of marriage,” Neidecker said, grimacing. I asked her why she’d gone back to it, and she replied, emphatically, “Because I loved his ass.” After Restivo renovated her house, they decorated the living room with several pictures of Bob Dylan.

Lately, Restivo has been growing pineapples in the back yard. “They’re not like the pineapples you buy in the store, all hard,” he said. “I let them stay on the plant until they get soft and gold. To say they smell good would be an understatement.” Sometimes he volunteers to go into the woods near the lagoon—“where other people wouldn’t dare go,” Neidecker said—to distribute food to homeless people who sleep there.

A few times a week, when the weather is good, Restivo goes to the beach and casts for snook and bluefish and tarpon. Mostly he catches them and then lets them go. In his living room, he’d hung a placard that reads, “The charm of fishing is that it is the pursuit of what is elusive but attainable, and a perpetual series of occasions for hope.” “Sitting there in the prison cell and filing motion after motion after motion, and you’re hopeful—it’s kind of the same thing,” he told me.

Restivo said that he wasn’t impatient to receive his money—“I’m used to waiting”—and that he didn’t fantasize about what he would do with eighteen million dollars. He thought about it for a moment. “I mean, listen, I would, like, you know, bless myself with a nice boat.” He already had a name for it: Best Revenge.

Whether or not the money comes through, Neidecker and Restivo are looking forward to doing some travelling. “John wants to go to Alaska and go ice fishing,” she said. “We both want to go to Northern California. But roughing it? No.” She meant no camping out: she wanted to travel in a Winnebago. Neidecker’s retirement from the post office was not far off; soon she would get her pension, and they could go whenever they wanted. She shrugged and said, “I’ve done my time.” ♦

*An earlier version of this article misstated John Ciampoli’s position.