by Gustavo Martínez Contreras

SHENANDOAH, Pa.— The scheduled Jan. 24 sentencing of two local high school football stars following their federal convictions relating to the beating death of a 25 year-old immigrant worker from Mexico, runs a baffling path through the U.S. jurisprudence system and its application of “hate crime” law.

First tried in state court by an all-white Schuykill County jury in 2008, Brandon J. Piekarsky and Derrick M. Donchak were acquitted of racial intimidation charges.

Now both men face up to life in prison for violating the rights of Luis Ramírez Zavala following a different set of charges brought on by the U.S. Justice Department. Two years after the attack, a federal jury in Scranton, Pa., convicted these young Ramírez Zavala’s brutal beating.

They were accused of violating the criminal component of the federal Fair Housing Act, which makes it a crime to use a person’s race, national origin or ethnicity as a basis to interfere, with violence or threats of violence, with a person’s right to live where he or she chooses.

The jury also found that Donchak conspired to, and did in fact, obstruct justice.

On the night of July 12, 2008, Piekarsky and Donchak, then 16 and 18 years old, were among a group of six young men who confronted Ramírez Zavala and began screaming racial slurs, “Go back to Mexico” and “Tell your fucking Mexican friends to get the fuck out of Shenandoah.”

HIS BRAIN OOZED OUT

Ramírez Zavala was beaten, kicked and stomped on. An autopsy showed that his skull had a double fracture: one in the back of the head and another on the left side. His brain oozed out and swelled up, causing his basic functions to stop.

He was taken to Geisinger Regional Medical Center, where he died two days later due to his massive head injuries.

In the first trial, the allwhite jury found Piekarsky guilty of one count of simple assault, while Donchak was found guilty of one count of simple assault, three counts of corruption of minors and three counts of furnishing alcohol to minors.

The verdict outraged immigrants’ rights organizations as well as politicians, who pressured the U.S. Department of Justice to open a separate investigation.

It wasn’t until December 2009 that a fed- eral grand jury indicted both men on a hate crime charge, thus avoiding a finding of double jeopardy — the instance in which a person or group of persons are prosecuted twice for the same crime — that the defense sought to prove until the trial’s end.

In a 14-page opinion, Judge Richard Caputo wrote, “In the present case, the federal prosecution serves divergent interests for the state prosecution, including equal protection rights and the integrity of federal criminal investigations.

This Court is not the proper forum to reverse more than 80 years of Supreme Court precedent permitting subsequent prosecution by separate sovereign without violating the double jeopardy clause.” In opening statements, defense attorneys downplayed race as a factor in Ramírez Zavala’s death.

Both James Swetz and William Fetterhoff, who represented Piekarsky and Donchak, respectively, said the fatal beating was a product of factors other than ethnic hatred. “We’re talking about alcohol, youth and testosterone. Those are the themes in this case, not race, and certainly not federally guaranteed housing rights,” Swetz told the allwhite jury.

But testimony from Colin Walsh, a key witness, showed Donchak felt deep hatred toward Shenandoah’s growing Hispanic community. “Yes, he didn’t like Hispanics; he really didn’t like them,” Walsh, 19, said. “He called them fucking Mexicans, fucking spics.”

He also said that Donchak would listen to racist music, and specifically sing the song “White Man Marches On” while driving around with friends. The song is taken from the sound track for the movie American History X.

In his account of the attack, Walsh, who reached a plea agreement with federal prosecutors and is now awaiting sentencing, said that both Donchak and Piekarsky yelled racial slurs at Ramírez Zavala. “Derrick punched him in the face and called him ‘spic’, and Piekarsky yelled racist slurs. He was yelling at him, ‘fucking Mexican’.Later I heard him yell, ‘Tell your fucking Mexican friends to leave Shenandoah or you’ll be fucking lying next to them’ as we were leaving.”

Donchak is also charged with conspiring with some of his friends, their parents and members of the Shenandoah Police Department to obstruct the investigation of the fatal assault immediately after the beating.

Witnesses testified that Piekarsky told them not tell anyone he had kicked Ramírez Zavala in the head.

“I asked who kicked him,” witness Benjamin Lawson testified. “Brandon  Piekarsky said, ‘I did, shh!’” The group began to make up the cover-up story they would tell police, Lawson recounted.

Another witness, Brian Scully, told the jury that Piekarsky arrived at the Donchak house with his mom as the teens talked about the fight. “We got to get a story. This is bad,” said Scully. “We thought if we had the same story it would be believable.” He added that Piekarsky cautioned him at least twice not to tell anybody he had kicked the deceased in the head. Former Shenandoah policemen Matthew Nestor, William Moyer and Jason Hayes face charges of conspiring to obstruct justice during the investigation.

The three of them, along with the Shenandoah Police Department, are standing trial this week in Wilkes-Barre, Pa.

A federal indictment ­charges them with conspiring to obstruct justice during the investigation into the fatal beating The federal investigation shed light also onto the wrongdoings of the Shenandoah Police Department. Matthew R. Nestor, William Moyer and Jason Hayes, three former policemen of that department, face federal charges for participation in the coverup of the crime. Just after Luis Ramírez’s death, many Latino residents expressed fear of the police. Those who spoke, under anonymity, told stories of abuse and intimidation done unto them or somebody they knew

FEDS INDICT POLICE

Even I, as a journalist, was denied information several times. “Nothing happened here,” then-Lieutenant Moyer told me once.

“We don’t have anything for you here.” As it turns out, they probably had plenty of information from everybody, and were hoping it would go away.

In a federal indictment, Nestor, Moyer and Hayes, who were chief, lieutenant and officer, respectively, along with the Shenandoah police department, are charged with conspiring to obstruct justice during the investigation into the fatal beating. Moyer has also been charged with witness and evidence tampering and lying to the FBI.

If convicted, the defendants face 20 years in prison on each of the obstruction charges and an additional five years in prison for conspiring to obstruct justice. Moyer faces an additionalfive years in prison for making false statements to the FBI.

Piekarsky and Donchak are being held at the Pike County Correctional Facility pending their Jan. 24 sentencing. Both face life in prison. Hispanic Link.

(Gustavo Martínez Contreras is a freelance writer and contributing columnist with Hispanic Link News Service. Email him at pasajero@gmail.com.)

por David Bacon

New America Media

Oakland residents walk with their newly elected and first chinese american Mayor Jean Quan during her first tour through downtown: (PHOTOS BY DAVID BACON)

OAKLAND, CA – Oakland Mayor Jean Quan walked through the city on her inauguration day, last January 3rd. She is the first Chinese American woman elected mayor. She started at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center in Chinatown. She then stopped at the Asian Resource Gallery, which featured an exhibit of posters curated by Greg Morizumi, from the Third World Strike at the University of California and political movements in the Asian American community since the 1960s.

Mayor Quan designed one of the posters in the exhibit, protesting the beating death of Vincent Chin. During her walk, she visited Lincoln Elementary School, in the heart of Chinatown.

Quan was previously a member of the Oakland School Board, and students excited by her visit made small speeches and sang for her. Kindergarten-age children looked on through the school windows.

Her walk took her down 17th Street, where storeowners have been hit hard by the economic recession. One storeowner hugged her, as the mayor urged Oakland residents to support local businesses by shopping in the city.

The last stop on Mayor Quan’s walk was the Leamington Hotel, where her father worked as a cook. There she was honored by the leaders

of the Alameda County ­Central Labor Council, the International Longhsore and Warehouse Union, and other local unions, along with the longshore union’s drill team. Mayor Quan’s husband, Floyd Huen, her son and daughter, and state Assembly member Sandre Swanson, one of her strongest supporters, all walked with her together with dozens of well-wishers.

by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger

(NaturalNews) Not content to kill 100,000 Americans each year with deadly Big Pharma drugs while censoring the truth about the healing effects of herbs, nutritional supplements and natural medicines, the FDA has now set out to deny Americans access to yet another lifesaving medicine known simply as vitamin C.

As reported by the Alliance for Natural Health, the FDA has notified a manufacturer of injectable vitamin C that it will be amercriminally prosecuted if it continues to manufacture this lifesaving nutritional therapy. (http://www.anhusa.org/action-alert…)

Why injectable vitamin C saves lives

In an age where tens of millions of Americans are already vitamin C deficient and suffer from colds and other infections that can be prevented with vitamins, the FDA appears to be acting on what can only be called a death wish for the American people.

But really, it’s more likely a targeted attack at the alternative cancer industry that frequently uses injectable vitamin C to help patients eliminate cancer tumors and heal from various cancers.

If there’s one thing that the health authorities in the United States absolutely cannot tolerate, it’s natural cures for cancer.

That’s why (nearly) all the natural cancer treatment clinics have been chased out of the country, leaving only toxic chemotherapy centers (poison clinics) in their place. And that’s probably why the FDA is going after vitamin C right now as well. Take away enough natural cures and the people will be forced into accepting conventional medicine, regardless of whether it works or not.

Injectable vitamin C has many other uses besides cancer, too. As the ANH reports, “The government, instead of banning intravenous vitamin C, should instead be supporting research into it. Even though IV C is being used in burn units around the world, including in the US, and has been adopted by the military for this purpose, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) refuses to fund any studies using intravenous C in patients.

There are privately funded studies currently underway, but of course these cannot continue if the FDA bans the substance.”

Take action now to protect your access to vitamin C

Please take a moment to take action with both of the following petitions:

The Alliance for Natural Health has posted an online action item that sends a letter to Dr Margaret Hamburg, the commissioner of the FDA: https://secure3.convio.net/aahf/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=648

The Natural Solutions Foundation has also posted an action item, this one going out to various FDA and government offi cials: h t t p : / / s a l s a . d e m o cr a c y i n a c t i o n . o rg / . . .

Of course, sending these letters to FDA bureaucrats assumes that they give a damn about human health in the first ­place, and after observing the FDA’s behavior over the last several years, I can confi dently state that the FDA’s own actions betray its real agenda: To protect the profits of the drug companies by eliminating competing products such as vitamin C.

As Dr Rima Laibow says about this issue, “When injectible Vitamin C goes, the rest will soon go, and the natural Docs WILL be criminalized a la the infamous Flexner report. Codex standards effectively criminalize accurate speech on nutrition. This IS the other shoe; I do not believe we are being alarmist.”

The rise of tyranny

The larger issue here, however, is not this isolated decision by the FDA but rather the question:

Why do unelected regulatory bureaucrats have such power in the first place?

While we may elect lawmakers in America today, those lawmakers have long since delegated the real “laws of the land” to bureaucratic agencies like the FDA which are run by unelected politicians who simply write their own laws and regulations without the approval of Congress. This situation is described by attorney Jonathan Emord as The Rise of Tyranny, which also happens to be the name of his book on the topic (http://www.amazon.com/R i s e – T y r a n n y – . . . )

This book, which I consider a “must read” on the subject of health freedom, explains how the delegation of powers to rogue federal agencies (FDA, DEA, DHS, TSA, etc.) results in the nation being ruled by tyrannical bureaucrats who operate outside the authority of Congress. Under this power structure, for example, the FDA could simply announce one day that “all vitamins are illegal,” without Congressional approval and without any new laws being debated or signed into law. The delegation of powers to agencies like the FDA is the granting of dictatorial police state powers over entire sectors of our society.