Vol. 49 No. 37
January 3, 2019 - January 9, 2019
This publication is a Certified DBE/ SBE / MBE in the State of California CUCP #43264 Metro File #7074 & State of Texas File #802505971 Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them and these will continue till they have resisted either with words or blows or words or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they suppress. —Fredrick Douglass (1849)
First Member of Congress Calls for Trump’s Resignation Amid Month of Chaos
Editor in Chief’s Corner Email: sbamericannews@gmail.com Clifton Harris Publisher of The San Bernardino AMERICAN News
Gov. Jerry Brown orders new tests in quadruple-murder case of death row inmate Kevin Cooper ByALENETCHEKMEDYIAN
By Lauren Victoria Burke, NNPA Newswire Contributor
Kevin Cooper, center, was convicted in 1985 of killing four people and sentenced to death. Years after the trial, experts and critics have raised doubts about whether authorities sent the right person to prison. (Associated Press)
Rep. Gwen Moore (D-WI) (Photo: YouTube) On Christmas Eve, Milwaukee Congresswoman Gwen Moore became the first sitting member of Congress to demand that President Donald Trump resign from the presidency. She made her comments as the Dow dove 500 points on December 24 in worst Christmas Eve trading day ever. As of Christmas, the market was on track to suffer its worst December since the Great Depression. “Some of this money for the doggone wall, I wish they would put into places like Flint and Milwaukee,” said Rep. Moore during the interview. The Congresswoman worked to secure millions of dollars to remove lead from America’s water infrastructure. During an interview on the Scott Dworkin report, Rep. Moore
said that President Trump “resigning is a dignified way for him to leave as opposed to being impeached or as opposed to being indicted or having the 25th amendment evoked. It’s really a very palliative approach to ask him to just go quietly and spare us all this pain.” December 2018 featured a turbulent series of events around the 45th President. His Secretary of Defense, retired Marine General James Mattis, resigned. The White House Chief of Staff, John Kelly, set a time for his departure. The federal government partly shut down as Trump reportedly became angry with a budget bill that didn’t include billions in funding for a wall at the U.S. and Mexican border. Two children died in U.S. custody as Trump Adminis-
tration policy on immigration was led by relative policy novice, Stephen Miller. Though many other members of Congress have been consistently critical of the President, Moore is now the first member of Congress to actually call for him to resign. Nine members of the House have either stated on the record that President Trump should be impeached or assisted in moving articles of impeachment to the floor of the U.S. House. The impeachment effort against Trump has been led by Rep. Al Green of Texas. In October 2017, Rep. Green drafted an impeachment resolution and articles of impeachment and attempted to have it considered on the House floor against the wishes of Demo-
cratic leadership. Rep. Green would be joined a year later by Reps. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), Marcia Fudge (DOhio). Non-CBC members Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.), Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.), Steve Cohen (DTenn.), Adriano Espaillat (D-NY), Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) and John Yarmuth (D-Ky.). Currently President Trump’s approval rating is only 40 percent. Democrats will take control of the U.S. House on January 3rd. Lauren Victoria Burke is an independent journalist and writer for NNPA as well as a political analyst and strategist as Principal of Win Digital Media LLC. She may be contacted at LBurke007@gmail.com and on twitter at @LVBurke
NAACP Joins Ferguson Activist in Demanding Answers in Alleged Hanging Death of Son NNPA Newswire FERGUSON, MO — As the nation moves into the Holiday season, it’s been a brutal eightweeks since that dreadful day when Ferguson-based activist Melissa McKinnies found her son Danye Jones hanging dead from a tree in her yard; eight weeks with no answer from the St. Louis County Medical Examiner’s Office regarding the cause of death. While reports from police say the death was reported as a “suicide,” McKinnies says no, it was a “lynching.” She believes that she and other activists who have protested police brutality, including the deaths of Michael Brown Jr., and Freddie Gray in Baltimore, have been targeted and monitored not only by racists and White Nationalists, but also agencies within the US government. She believes there was foul play in the death of her son and is calling on transparency by police. “My son was murdered, point blank,” said McKinnies. “We are demanding the Medical Examiner’s office to release its findings and demanding police investigate his death as a murder,”
Gov. Jerry Brown on Monday ordered new tests of physical evidence in the case of Kevin Cooper, whose high-profile quadruple-murder conviction three decades ago has come into question in recent years. Brown said in a statement that he was directing “limited retesting of certain physical evidence in the case and appointing a retired judge as a special master to oversee this testing, its scope and protocols.” Cooper has maintained his innocence throughout the case and has claimed that law enforcement planted evidence and ignored statements by witnesses that pointed to other possible suspects. He has lost more than a dozen appeals. Brown’s legal staff has been digging into Cooper’s 2016 clemency petition, discussing the case with both prosecutors and defense attorneys. In July, Brown said he would consider Cooper’s request to order additional forensic testing in the case. Cooper’s attorneys have said some key items recovered during the investigation were never properly tested and should be analyzed using more current DNA technology. The case dates to 1983, when three family members and an unrelated boy, 11-year-old Christopher Hughes, were found hacked and slashed to death in a Chino Hills home. The boy’s father discovered the bloodied bodies when he went to the hilltop home looking for Christopher, who had not returned from a sleepover in time for church one Sunday morning. Through the window, he discovered the bodies of Doug and Peggy Ryen, their 10-year-old daughter, Jessica, and Christopher. The victims had been stabbed a total of 143 times with an ice pick, an ax and a knife. The Ryens’ 8-year-old son, Joshua, was slashed across the throat but survived. News reports at the time said the case shook the community so powerfully that homeowners began locking their doors at night and parents no longer allowed
their children to attend sleepovers. Two days before the killings, Cooper had escaped from a prison in Chino, where he was serving a sentence for burglary. Police found ample evidence — cigarette butts, a button from a prison uniform, a leather hatchet sheath — that Cooper had spent two days in a house near the Ryens’ after his escape. He was arrested about seven weeks after the killings. At the trial, jurors heard the lone survivor give a videotaped statement that conflicted with what he had said when he was first interviewed by authorities. After Joshua Ryen was airlifted to a hospital, he told a sheriff’s deputy and a social worker that his attackers were three white men. An hour later, he said they were Latino. Later that month, the boy told a deputy that Cooper, who is black, was not the killer after he saw the man’s face on a wanted poster on television. Jurors heard him say that he saw just one man or maybe a shadow in his home. The clues at the Ryens’ unlocked home were scant: a bloody shoe print on a sheet in the master bedroom and a single drop of blood on a wall in the hallway. At his trial and throughout the appeals process, Cooper’s attorneys argued that the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department had destroyed or suppressed evidence suggesting the attackers were three white men, including a convicted contract killer. Meanwhile, Cooper repeatedly maintained his innocence. At one point, he told a prosecutor: “You’re trying to make me remember detail by detail. … I only know what I didn’t do.” Cooper was convicted and sentenced to death in 1985. In 2002, the attorney general’s office green-lighted additional DNA testing in the case. The results showed that Cooper’s DNA was on a bloody T-shirt found outside a bar near the Ryens’ home, on two cigarette butts inside the family’s stolen station wagon and in the blood droplet (continued on page 3)
Dayne Jones (Photo: Dayne Jones Facebook page) she added. The St. Louis County NAACP is joining the McKinnies family in the call for transparency and justice regarding the murder of Danye Jones. “There’s too many unanswered questions that we are demanding answers to,” said John Gaskin III, St. Louis County NAACP President. “We support Mrs. McKinnies call for justice and transparency in the death of her son.”
According to a report in the Washington Post several deaths of Ferguson Activists since 2014 have “inspired speculation that Ferguson protesters are being systematically murdered…” While the reports suggests there is no evidence yet regarding this, numerous media reports have confirmed the surveillance of Black activists by Federal agencies. Earlier this year groups Color of
Change and the Center for Constitutional Rights filed a lawsuit against DHS and the FBI regarding information on the government’s tracking of activists involved in the Movement for Black Lives. For McKinnies, the most pressing matter right now is justice regarding her son’s death. “This is about justice! All Black lives matter and so does the life of my son!”
Our Values, Mission, & Vision Statement Our Values: Treat all people with care, respect, honor, and dignity. Tell it as it is with love, truth and integrity. Promote the interests of advertisers and sponsors along their strategic interest for the betterment of the community and beyond. Speak truth to power. Our Mission: To continuously improve communication between all people of the world. Our Vision: To be the best community newspaper in our region and the nation. Provider of: A voice for the poor, the underserved, those that are marginalized, Positive and edifying news about people, places and businesses. Keep San Bernardino, Riverside, and Los Angeles Counties informed about global trends while retaining the consciousness of local events and processes. Memberships and Associations: The San Bernardino American Newspaper is a member of the California Newspaper Publishers Association, National Newspaper Association and addociated with California Black Media.