By David Hungerford | April 1, 2012 |Read more articles in Housing Struggles Orange, NJ – Over 30 people turned out, …Read the Rest
Tag: Orange NJ
The Star-Ledger: Rally to Remember Police Brutality Against 62 Yr Old Woman
East Orange - Esmay Parchment remembers the details of Feb. 4, 2001, with brutal clarity. She was in the shower …Read the Rest
Activists demand that Earl Faison case be reopened by Shabazz, Saeed (New York Amsterdam News)
NEWARK-The Newark-based People’s Organization for Progress (POP) hand delivered a letter to New Jersey State Attorney General Zelima V. Farber on April 11, regarding re-opening the murder case of Earl Faison. It has been seven years since the aspiring rapper died at age 27 at the hands of five Orange, New Jersey police officers, who had arrested him as a suspect in the murder of a fellow police officer.
The U.S. Attorney said that Faison died in a “stairwell of torture” because he was brutalized out of the sight of those who were present in the Orange police station where they were holding him. Police officials stated in 1999 that Faison died of an asthma attack. While he remained handcuffed, Faison was beaten and pepper sprayed in his mouth and nose.
The POP letter to the attorney general stated that the case should be reopened because Taison lost more than his civil rights, he lost his life and someone must be held accountable for his death.” It also stated in the letter that if “the murder case of Emmett Till can be reopened after 50 years…then the case of Earl Faison can be reopened after seven years.”
People vs. Police Terror Interview with Parents of Police Murder Victims
Fight Back! talked on May 8 with Elizabeth (Bonnie) Moore, whose son Rasheed, 26, was killed in January by Newark, NJ police officer Thomas Ruane (see Fight Back! March/April 2005.) Fight Back! also talked with Earl Williams, whose son Earl Faison was killed by Orange, NJ policemen in April of 1999. After a struggle of five years, led by the Faison’s family and by the People’s Organization for Progress, four cops were sentenced to terms of 33 months each for violations of the victim’s civil rights. One officer was sentenced to nine years.
Activists want killer cops jailed by Saeed Shabazz (The Final Call)
Protesters gathered on December 19, in front of the Peter Rodino Federal Building here to demand that the five Orange, New Jersey police officers convicted in December 2000 in the death of Earl Faison, 27, be sent to jail.
December 19 marks the third anniversary of the guilty verdicts in the Faison case. “It has been three years and the five officers found guilty in federal court of violating Mr. Faison’s civil rights have not been to jail or even sentenced for their crimes,” Larry Hamm, head of the Newark-based group Peoples Organization for Progress, told The Final Call. “We are out here today to call attention to the injustices facing Black people.”
Mr. Faison, an innocent Black man who was wrongly apprehended as a suspect in the murder of Orange police officer Joyce Anne Carnegie, died after being in police custody for 45 minutes on April 11, 1999.