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Posted by Dave
Rap News Network
6/1/2005 10:19:44 AM
Tags and topics realted to this article include Mos Def and Dead Prez.
On Wednesday, May 25th at 1:30pm, Brooklyn City Councilmember Charles Barron will be joined by community members and leaders to hold a press conference on the steps of City Hall condemning a one-million-dollar bounty offered on May 2nd for the capture of Assata Shakur.
“I’m infuriated that a bounty has been put on her, placing her in danger,” said Councilmember Barron – who called for Wednesday’s press conference – “She is a hero to our community, its long overdue for her to receive clemency and come home.” Barron will also introduce a resolution later that day at the New York City Council denouncing this recent move and calling for Shakur’s clemency.
In an unprecedented move, on May 2nd the Federal Justice Department, working side by side with New Jersey’s Attorney General, also placed the 58-year-old grandmother on the Federal Domestic Terrorist list. Barron and others are demanding that Assata Shakur be removed from that list, insisting that she is innocent.
This action is being taken 32 years after Ms. Shakur and two companions were stopped on the New Jersey Turnpike in 1973 allegedly for a “broken tail light”. One passenger, Zayd Shakur, was shot dead, Assata was shot and wounded, and Trooper Werner Forester also lay dead. Another Panther, Sundiata Acoli, was later taken into custody.
In 1979 Assata escaped from a New Jersey jail and seven years later received political asylum from the government of Cuba. “Assata was granted asylum in Cuba because the Cuban government understands that she was convicted in a climate where she and anyone who stood up for the human rights of Black people was completely criminalized” says Kamau Karl Franklin, an attorney and member of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. “She never had a chance at a fair trial in this country.”
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