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Bryne Grants and another conscequence featured in new film: "American Violet"

By Real Cost of Prisons Project (The Sentencing Project)

Taking Drug Task Forces to Task By: Lewis Beale April 17, 2009 In November 2000, a drug task force arrested 28 residents of Hearne, Texas, almost all of them African-American, and charged them with distributing crack cocaine. Pressed to plead guilty to the charges by their public defenders, several of the accused did, but Regina Kelly, a single mother of four, refused. The American Civil Liberty Union's Drug Law Reform Project eventually took up the case and filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of 15 of the arrestees, accusing the local district attorney and the South Central Texas Narcotics Task Force with conducting racially motivated drug sweeps for more than 15 years. That case, which wound up with the charges against all the ACLU's clients being dropped due to insufficient evidence and the tainted testimony of an unreliable police informant, is now the basis of a movie, "American Violet", opening nationwide on April 17th...continue to full post

Full post as published by The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog on April 18, 2009 (boomark / email).