29 August 201217 December 2022 4WardEverUK

Why did police shoot dead an unarmed man 7 years ago?

by: Defend the Right to Protest
published: 29 August 2012

Police officers have shot dead 41 men and one woman in the past 15 years. Some of the names on that list, Mark Duggan, Jean Charles de Menezes and Mark Saunders, have become household names after the controversies surrounding their deaths were exposed.

Another name on that list, Azelle Rodney, is not engrained into the public consciousness. But, with a public inquiry into his death due to open on Monday, seven years after he was shot at close range six times by an officer known only as E7, it could soon be.

Mr Rodney, a 24-year-old black man, was in the back of a Volkswagen Golf when it was stopped by three police vehicles carrying 14 specialist firearm officers from the Met’s elite C019 armed unit in April 2005.

27 August 201217 December 2022 4WardEverUK

Lawrence killers lose appeal to challenge conviction

all credits: The Voice
published: 23 August 2012

The two men found guilty of the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993 have lost their first round of their attempt to challenge their convictions.

Gary Dobson and David Norris were jailed for life in January for the murdering the black teenager near a bus stop in Eltham, south-east London.

Dobson is serving a minimum of 15 years and two months, and David Norris 14 years and three months. Their applications for permission to appeal were rejected by a single Court of Appeal judge, who considered the papers from the case.

27 August 201217 December 2022 4WardEverUK

Five examples of civil disobedience to remember

by: Richard Seymour | Comment is free
published: 20 August 2012

When Spanish mayor Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo recently led farmers on a supermarket sweep, raiding the local shops for food as part of a campaign against austerity, his political immunity as an elected assembly member protected him from arrest.

He now asks other local mayors to ignore central government demands for budget cuts and refuse to implement evictions and lay-offs. In this era of austerity, such flagrant disrespect for the law ought to be encouraged. Sometimes, the greatest strength of popular movements is their capacity to disrupt. So here, for the benefit of imaginative indignados, are five examples of civil disobedience.