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Winning Justice for David Dungay

5yrs ago from Green Left Weekly
Young Aboriginal man David Dungay jnr died on December 29, 2015 after pleading for his life in the mental health wing of Sydney’s Long Bay jail. The 26-year-old Dunghutti man from Kempsey, a known diabetic, suffered a cardiac arrest when he was pinned down by four members of the prison’s Immediate Action Team (IAT) for refusing to stop eating biscuits and injected with two strong sedatives. He was due to be released three weeks later. It took the family and supporters two-and-a-half years to wrest a coronial inquiry from the government. Originally scheduled for the small coronial court in Glebe, it was moved to Downing Centre local court, to accommodate the large numbers of family, friends, supporters and activists.  The two-week inquest, held from July 16 to 27, mirrored hundreds of other coronial inquiries into the deaths of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in custody.
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Former Ethics Czar Richard Painter Warns of Trump’s ‘mental Stability’ After He Incriminated Himself on Twitter

5yrs ago from Raw Story
Former Bush ethics lawyer, Richard Painter, called out President Donald Trump for posting incriminating tweets and said the president’s mental health should be checked. On Wednesday, President Trump tweeted that Attorney General Jeff Sessions should un-recuse himself from the Special Counsel Robert Muller’s investigation. “It’s certainly evidence of obstruction of justice. And first, we really have to worry about the mental stability of our president when he is incriminating himself on Twitter,” Painter said. He …
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Trump Officials Were Warned Family Separation Could Cause 'Traumatic Psychological Injury' to Children

5yrs ago from The Week
A refugee resettlement official told the Trump administration that separating families at the border posed psychological dangers for children. The policy proceeded anyway. Jonathan White, the Office of Refugee Resettlement's former deputy director, told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday that "there is no question that separation of children from parents entails significant potential for traumatic psychological injury to the child." White told lawmakers that he relayed that same information to White House officials for months, but was consistently told family separation "was not the policy of the United States." Top HHS official says the agency warned the Trump administration that separating children from their parents would be detrimental to their health."We raised a number of concerns...about any policy which would result in family separation." https://t.co/CijoTWLAeC pic.twitter.com/2KqrrH3taB — ABC News (@ABC) July 31, 2018 White was part of a committee hearing with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, Border Patrol, and ORR officials to answer questions about President Trump's policy separating children from parents at the border. Before he left his ORR position on March 15, he was part of discussions surrounding a hypothetical family separation policy. But even on the day he left the agency — just weeks before the family separation policy took effect — White said he was essentially told it wasn't going to happen. Flash forward a few months, and multiple experts have backed up White's insistence that family separation has hurt children's mental health. White also discussed how border patrol systems for tracking migrant children were "not set up to have referrals include parent information," seeing as those unaccompanied minors usually didn't arrive with guardians to begin with. That's one of several reasons reunification is taking longer than expected, White said at Tuesday's hearing. Most children in ORR care do arrive at the border without a parent or guardian, White affirmed. Only about 15 to 20 percent of unaccompanied children were actually separated by the government, and that includes children who were taken from parents with serious criminal records — something ORR has been doing for years. Kathryn Krawczyk
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