High-profile firing adds to troubles for Montgomery’s SPLC
The high-profile firing of the co-founder of a liberal group best known for monitoring hate organizations is only the latest trouble for the nonprofit, which got its start handling civil rights cases in the Deep South. At least three lawsuits filed by U.S. conservatives are pending against the Southern Poverty Law Center over its public labeling of groups it considers extremist, and a separate claim by a British organization resulted in a multimillion-dollar settlement and an unusual public apology less than a year ago. The Montgomery, Alabama-based law center announced Thursday it had dismissed its 82-year-old founder, Morris Dees. A statement from the group’s president, Richard Cohen, didn’t specify the reason for Dees’ dismissal but said the organization must act when staff conduct doesn’t meet its standards. “The SPLC is deeply committed to having a workplace that reflects the values it espouses – truth, justice, equity and inclusion, and we believe the steps we have taken today reaffirm that commitment,” Cohen said. The firing could be a blow to the organization where Dees gained fame during a career that included winning multimillion-dollar verdicts against the Ku Klux Klan and the Aryan Nations. He is arguably its best-known public face with thousands of donors who helped the organization build assets totaling $450 million. In a message on the law center’s website, Cohen praised Dees’ “incredible contributions to the fight against racial injustice in our country” and added: “But our work is about the cause, not the person.” Dees said his dismissal involved a personnel issue but would not elaborate. He also didn’t criticize the organization he helped found nearly 50 years ago. “I think the Southern Poverty Law Center is a very fine group and I devoted nearly 50 years of my life to it and I’m proud of its work,” Dees said. Board members contacted by The Associated Press either declined comment or referred questions of the law center. Dees’ dismissal came nine months after the law center agreed to a $3.4 million settlement after wrongly labeling a British organization and its founder as extremists. The law center issued statements saying it was wrong to include the London-based Quilliam and Maajid Nawaz in a “Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists.” Meanwhile, the law center or its staffers face three similar lawsuits from conservative groups. Most recently, the founder of a far-right men’s group called the Proud Boys, Gavin McInnes, sued the Southern Poverty Law Center last month for labeling the organization a hate group. The lawsuit contends the designation is false and damaged McInnes’ career. The conservative Center for Immigration Studies sued Richard Cohen, the law center’s president, and Heidi Beirich, the director of its intelligence unit, in January in federal court claiming the organization had wrongly labeled it as an anti-immigrant hate group. And a Maryland attorney, Glen K. Allen, sued the law center, Beirich and a former staffer in December saying it wrongly called him a “neo-Nazi lawyer.” The lawsuits opened a new front for the law center, which has long been a target of the groups it monitors. Three Klansmen pleaded guilty to firebombing the organization’s office in Montgomery in 1983; Dees helped sort through charred papers outside the building the morning after the attack. Dees got his start in sales, founding a direct mail marketing company that specialized in publishing while he was a student at the University of Alabama. A company the Alabama native started with the late Millard Fuller, who went on to begin Habitat for Humanity, which constructs homes for the needy, grew into a major regional publishing company. Eleven years after earning his law degree, Dees and partner Joseph J. Levin Jr. formed the Southern Poverty Law Center in 1971 to handle civil rights cases and represent clients including the poor, minorities and prisoners. Dees was finance director for President Jimmy Carter’s campaign in 1976. After a career that included near-constant court fights against right-wing extremists, Dees was honored with the American Bar Association’s highest honor in 2012. In his acceptance speech, Dees praised the tenacity of the law center, which now has more than 350 employees in five states. “None of our lawyers have ever backed down or quit; or any of our staff has ever backed down or quit because of the trials and tribulations we’ve had to face,” he said. Republished with permission from the Associated Press.
Judge: Alabama has been ‘indifferent’ to isolated inmates
A federal judge said Monday that Alabama has been “deliberately indifferent” about monitoring the mental health of state inmates placed in the isolation of segregation cells. U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson issued the ruling days after attorneys for inmates said the suicide rate in state prisons has reached a crisis level. “The court finds that the (Alabama prison system’s) failure to provide adequate periodic mental-health assessments of prisoners in segregation creates a substantial risk of serious harm for those prisoners,” Thompson wrote in the 66-page order. Thompson wrote that prison officials have been “deliberately indifferent with regard to their failure to provide adequate periodic evaluations of mental health to prisoners in segregation.” Alabama Department of Corrections spokesman Bob Horton said the department is reviewing the decision. Thompson in 2017 wrote that mental health care in state prisons was “horrendously inadequate” and violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. In his Monday order, Thompson said the failure to adequately monitor inmates in segregation contributes to the unconstitutional conditions. Thompson directed the prison system and attorneys for inmates to confer on how to proceed. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which is representing inmates in the ongoing class-action lawsuit over prison mental health care, praised the decision. “It has been evident for years that ADOC has failed to identify, monitor, and properly care for people who have serious mental illnesses and who develop them in ADOC custody. That systematic failure has led to needless suffering, especially for people in segregation,” said Maria Morris, senior supervising attorney at the SPLC. The advocacy organization said Friday that there have been 13 suicides in 14 months. “People are killing themselves in our prisons because conditions are horrendous,” Southern Poverty Law Center President Richard Cohen said at a news conference with the families of inmates. The prison system said in a response Friday that it was working to address the issue, and said the suicide spike “calls into question the long-term effectiveness of the suicide prevention measures proposed by the SPLC” during the litigation. Republished with permission from the Associated Press
Advocacy group: Alabama has prison suicide crisis
An advocacy group charged Friday that Alabama officials have failed to address a rising suicide rate in state prisons despite a federal court order to improve conditions for mentally ill inmates. Attorneys representing inmates in an ongoing lawsuit over mental health care argued state officials have done “precious little” to address inmate suicides. “People are killing themselves in our prisons because conditions are horrendous,” Southern Poverty Law Center President Richard Cohen said at a news conference outside the Alabama Statehouse. The organization said there have been 13 suicides in 14 months, the latest one on Wednesday. Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey’s office and the prison system did not immediately react to the allegations. A prison system spokesman said the department was working on a response. However, a state lawmaker said the prison system is working to improve conditions, but cautioned it will take time. “There is no question the suicide rate is higher than it should be. The data speaks for itself,” said state Sen. Cam Ward, who chairs a prison oversight committee. Alabama Department of Corrections monthly reports list that they were four inmate suicides in fiscal year 2017 and six in 2018. In late December and January, there were three suicides within four weeks in the state prisons. With their 8-year-old granddaughter beside her, Jerri Ford wiped away tears as she described the loss of her husband, Paul Ford. “He was our everything, everything and we don’t have him anymore. And it’s not right,” Jerri Ford said. Paul Ford, 49, was found hanging last month from a bed sheet in his cell at Kilby Correctional Facility. He was serving a sentence of life in prison without parole following a murder conviction. In court filings, the SPLC said, Ford had a prior suicide attempt and spent much of the past year in a restrictive setting or on some form of crisis watch. Jerri Ford said in the months before his death, she began to worry about her husband’s mental state. “He was seeing things, hallucinating. … He was scared to go to sleep,” she said. Inmate lawyers have asked a federal judge to block the state from placing prisoners with serious mental illnesses into segregation units or similar settings, where they said the extreme isolation becomes an incubator for worsening mental health symptoms. The judge responded by asking for the state to provide information on how many inmates are in such settings. U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson in 2017 ruled that mental health care in Alabama prisons was “horrendously inadequate.” In court filings, the state contends it has added mental health staff and is working to increase the number of corrections officers working in state prisons. Corrections Commissioner Jeff Dunn told lawmakers last month that the department is seeking a funding increase to hire 500 additional corrections officers, what he called a “down payment” amid plans to eventually add 2,000 correctional officers Ivey is expected to announce a proposal soon to replace state prisons, possibly leasing facilities built by private firms. The SPLC criticized the push for prison construction, saying the plan will be costly when the state faces a staff shortage. “Jamming thousands of people into some shiny new building will not solve the constitutional violations,” Maria Morris, an attorney with the SPLC, said. Republished with permission from the Associated Press
SPLC apologizes, pays $3.3M to Islamic reformer it wrongly labeled ‘anti-Muslim extremist’
The Montgomery, Ala.-based Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) on Monday announced a settlement agreement with Islamic reformer Maajid Nawaz and his organization, the Quilliam Foundation, for wrongly including them on a now-deleted list of “anti-Muslim extremists.” The list, A Journalist’s Manual: Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists, was published as a resource for journalists in 2016 to help identify “anti-Muslim extremists.” Nawaz, a current Muslim and a former Islamist, threatened to sue the SPLC for defamation for wrongly accusing him of being an extremist. Seeing has how they had no path to win in court, the SPLC admitted their error in inclusion and agreed to pay Nawaz and Quilliam $3.375 million “to fund their work to fight anti-Muslim bigotry and extremism.” “Since we published the Field Guide, we have taken the time to do more research and have consulted with human rights advocates we respect,” SPLC president Richard Cohen said in a statement. “We’ve found that Mr. Nawaz and Quilliam have made valuable and important contributions to public discourse, including by promoting pluralism and condemning both anti-Muslim bigotry and Islamist extremism.” Cohen said the SPLC will look to their insurance carrier to cover the cost of the settlement. “It was the right thing to do in light of our mistake and the right thing to do in light of the growing prejudice against the Muslim community on both sides of the Atlantic,” he added. Watch Cohen’s video statement below:
SPLC says 1,500 gov’t-funded Confederate symbols remain across U.S.
The Southern Poverty Law Center says more than a thousand taxpayer-funded symbols of the Confederacy persist on the American landscape. The left-leaning social justice and Civil Rights group released a report on Monday said the state of Alabama is in the top 10 when it comes to still-extant Confederate tributes. The news came ahead of the Confederate Memorial Day in Alabama, a major state-backed tribute to the Stars & Bars mandated by the state government in Montgomery. Two other Confederate holidays still exist in Alabama — General Robert E. Lee‘s birthday, celebrated on the third Monday in January, and former CSA President Jefferson Davis‘ birthday, celebrated on the first Monday in June. Six other states — North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Louisiana, Tennessee and Texas — continue to celebrate similar holidays. The SPLC said in a news release some 718 publicly-funded monuments and statues paying tribute to Confederate figures remain in the U.S., nearly 300 of which are in Georgia; 109 schools named after Lee, Davis, or other Dixie icons; and even 10 U.S. military bases bear the name of a rebel against the USA. Some state politicians, like State Auditor Jim Zeigler, have tussled with others who have tried to remove Confederate iconography from official spaces like the state Capitol, accusing them of attempting to “whitewash” or revise history. SPLC President Richard Cohen says that’s often not the case. “In many cases, preserving history was not the true goal of these displays,” Cohen said. “Rather, many of them were part of an effort to glorify a cause that was manifestly unjust — a cause that has been whitewashed by revisionist propaganda that began almost as soon as the Civil War ended. Other displays were intended as acts of defiance by white supremacists opposed to equality for African Americans during the civil rights movement.” “Public governmental displays of Confederate monuments and other symbols undermine the promise of equality that’s the basis of our democracy,” added Cohen. “The argument that these tributes represent Southern ‘heritage’ ignores the heritage of African-Americans whose ancestors were enslaved by the millions and later subjected to decades of oppression.” The SPLC included in their report an action guide for those seeking to purge the symbols from public sites.
Roy Moore denies defying U.S. Supreme Court
Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore – ousted from office a decade ago when he refused to remove a Ten Commandments monument from state property – on Thursday stood by his assertion that Alabama probate judges should not issue marriage licenses to gay couples, a seemingly direct challenge to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that effectively legalized same-sex marriages nationwide. Moore’s stance first appeared on Wednesday in an administrative order; he reiterated his position Thursday in an interview with The Associated Press. “Until further clarification, (the probate judges) are bound by state law,” Moore said. His order on Wednesday and his remarks on Thursday drew immediate condemnation from civil and gay rights organizations and from a legal advocacy group, which filed a complaint against him with a state commission that investigates judicial misconduct. His critics promptly suggested that he should be removed from the bench again for his refusal to accept the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision six months after it was handed down. Some of the judges who stopped issuing licenses Wednesday immediately after Moore’s order, meanwhile, resumed the service Thursday after consulting with attorneys. In his order, Moore noted that the Alabama Supreme Court has not lifted a March 3 ruling prohibiting probate judges from issuing licenses to gay couples. He said it’s up to the state court to decide what to do with that order following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision. Moore insisted Thursday that he is not defying the high court, but seeking to resolve what he says are lingering questions about the impact of the federal decision. He said he issued the order Wednesday because “there’s a lot of confusion out there among probate judges about what to do.” “Some are issuing same-sex marriage licenses, some are not, some are issuing no marriage licenses at all.” Two federal prosecutors in Alabama, however, said on Wednesday that there should be no confusion, because the U.S. Supreme Court ruling trumps whatever the state court has to say on gay marriage. Other Legal experts interviewed by the AP agreed. Richard Cohen, president of the Montgomery-based legal advocacy group the Southern Poverty Law Center, said Moore should be removed from office – again. “You know back in 2003 he was kicked out of office for violating a federal court order,” Cohen said. “This time he’s urging 68 probate judges to violate the federal court order that was entered by the district court in Mobile. He’s also asking them to ignore the ruling of the United States Supreme Court.” The center – which sued Moore over the Ten Commandment monument – filed an ethics complaint to the state’s judicial inquiry commission last year after Moore publicly criticized a federal judge’s ruling overturning Alabama’s same-sex marriage ban. The advocacy group filed a supplement to that complaint on Wednesday, saying Moore has violated the canons of judicial ethics by refusing to respect the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision. The court has not acted on the earlier complaint filed by the SPLC. Alabama Judicial Inquiry Commission Executive Director Jenny Garrett said she couldn’t comment specifically on Moore, but that any potential sanctions for a judge accused of misconduct would be imposed if the commission filed charges in the court of the judiciary and the court found the judge to have committed ethics violations. All proceedings before the commission are confidential and don’t become public until they move to the court of the judiciary, Garrett said. Sanctions the court could impose on a judge include removal from office, suspension without pay, censure and more, Garrett said. Wayne Flynt, a former Auburn University history professor, said Moore’s tactics echo Southern states’ resistance to federal school desegregation orders long after the segregation had been ruled illegal. “We arbitrated these issues between 1861 and 1865,” Flynt said of the Civil War conflict that determined who has the final say, states or the federal government. Regardless of his stance, Moore’s order did not appear to have widespread impact. Probate judges in Lawrence and Madison counties who had stopped issuing all marriage licenses in response to Moore’s order Wednesday said they had resumed the service Thursday after consulting with attorneys. Mobile County said licensing operations would resume on Friday. Republished with permission of the Associated Press.
