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Who Is Gary Freeman And Why Should He Be Allowed To Stay In Canada?
A Canadian family is suffering. They are suffering because a dearly beloved member of their family has been snatched away from them.
Douglas Gary Freeman (Joseph Pannell) is the subject of a United States extradition request stemming from a 1969 incident. He is an innocent man. We do not believe the best interests of justice would be served by uprooting him from his family and returning him to an uncertain fate in the United States.
This fact sheet, prepared by the Family and Friends of Gary Freeman, is designed to answer, as best as we can, questions that may arise when you read or hear about this case in the news.
Who is Gary Freeman?
Douglas Gary Freeman is an African-American born in Washington, D.C. His parents named him Joseph Coleman Pannell, Jr. Heather Mallick, writing in the Saturday, September 10, 2005 issue of the Globe and Mail, cites a United Nations report indicating that blacks in Washington, D.C. live in third world conditions. History indicates that conditions for blacks in Washington, D.C. remain virtually the same from the time of Mr. Freeman's birth. Gary Freeman came to Canada to survive. It is as simple, compelling and literal as that.
He also wanted to ensure that his unborn child would have a father and a home: a place where he hoped there would not be the same fear, discrimination, and lack of equality of opportunity, as in the United States.
Gary has been married to his Canadian wife for over 25 years and they have four children, all Canadian born and college-educated. There is great significance to the chosen name of Douglas Gary Freeman. Douglas is taken from the great African-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Gary is taken from the city of Gary, Indiana which elected the first black mayor of a significant American city as a result of the 1965 Voting Rights Act: Richard Hatcher. Freeman, well, that is self-explanatory. Thousands of American slaves, who took the Underground Railroad to Canada, did so because Canada was a safe haven, a place where there was "freedom". Freeman, the surname of his children, will live on no matter what happens.
Who are the Family & Friends of Gary Freeman?
Gary has an extensive community of love comprised of extended family, friends, and co-workers who all know who Gary Freeman really is. He is a father, husband and friend. He has lived an exemplary life in Canada, contributing to the community, acting as a mentor to young people and sharing his love of people, nature, history, jazz and the acquisition of knowledge. Many whose lives have been touched by this remarkable man have come together in his defence as Family and Friends of Gary Freeman.
Where is Gary Freeman?
Gary Freeman was arrested on July 27, 2004, outside the Toronto Reference Library, where he worked as a library research assistant for the previous 14 years. He has since been shuffled from one jail to another, both in Toronto (Metro West, Don Jail) and two hours north of the city at Penetanguishene. Although being behind bars is excruciating both for him and his family, he has not been idle, as he has continued his natural role as mentor to a younger generation of inmates trying to turn their lives around.
Why was Gary Freeman arrested?
Mr. Freeman is the subject of an extradition request by the United States government stemming from an incident which occurred on March 7, 1969 on the south side of Chicago with a white Chicago police officer, Terrence Knox. After almost four decades, the State of Illinois is attempting to put Freeman, aged 56, on trial to face charges of attempted murder and aggravated battery. One of Freeman's lawyers says "the question is whether the Canadian government is going to do the right thing and let this man, who has led a 35-year history here in Canada as a law-abiding citizen, an absolute pillar of the community, go on with his life or send him back to account for what amounts to civil liberties atrocities perpetrated by the United States of America in the late 1960s. Treating Pannell as a criminal and sending him back to the U.S. would make Canada complicit in those atrocities," he added.
What was Chicago like in 1969?
For many in the African-American community, Chicago, like most U.S. cities, felt like a city under armed occupation. That year, a committee was formed whose title painfully illustrated the social scene at the time: The Committee to End the Murder of Black People. The police murders of 11 young black men, so long a part of daily life that it hardly made the news, had reached such proportions that the community had to stand up and name this police practice for what it was: outright murder.
According to The Boston Review, "In the late 1960s, Chicago police led the nation in the slaying of private citizens, who were euphemistically characterized as 'fleeing felons' to mask the routine use of excessive force by police against racial minorities. The police also exploited seemingly benign offense categories, such as disorderly conduct, vagrancy, and loitering to bully minority youths and adults who had the audacity to challenge police authority."
Would Gary Freeman have received justice in 1969 Chicago?
A couple of weeks after the incident, Freeman was indicted by an all-white jury of his non-peers. Preliminary hearings established there was no probable cause to stop Mr. Freeman. Given the intense climate of fear and racism at the time, it is unlikely anyone would have listened to what Freeman said in his defence. As leading civil rights attorney William Kunstler wrote in the late 1980s, "For more than twenty years my representation of black defendants has been motivated by one of my strongest beliefs: that our society is always racist. None of our institutions, including our legal system, deliver on this country's fundamental promise that we are all created equal, especially those of us not born with white skins. …Rodney King [The L.A. motorist whose vicious beating by L.A. police was videotaped from afar] brought it home once again: No matter what the cops do, even if you have it on tape, they will not be convicted."
Why did Gary Freeman leave Chicago?
After two years in pre-trial custody, Freeman was released on bail. Freeman left Chicago because he feared for his life. He believed that he could not receive a fair trial. He was also about to become a father, and he did not want his first-born to inherit the reality, always prevalent for so many in the African-American community, that theirs is a life composed of police surveillance and harassment, unprovoked acts of violence, fear, and the daily barriers constructed by a society in which racism is as American as apple pie.
Is this prosecution or persecution?
COLD CASE FUELLED BY RACE AND POLITICS says the TORONTO STAR
(February 5, 2005)
Court documents (Supplemental Record of the Case for Prosecution) present false and contradictory evidence.
Neil Cohen, a Chicago-based lawyer representing Freeman, in a Toronto Star interview, August 3, 2005, said "Physical evidence does not corroborate certain people's testimony". In fact, certain people's testimony has been presented in two completely different versions.
Neil Cohen also said the character and agenda of police officer Terrence Knox are relevant to the case.
In 1975 documents produced in a class action lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Alliance to End Repression (a coalition of churches, women's groups, civil rights organizations, and war veterans) revealed the existence of a secret Chicago Police Security program (also known as the "Red Squads") - to disrupt and destroy law-abiding political and community groups. A heretofore secret police department special order had established a "Neutralization" program to "expose, cause to cease or change in direction" "anti-social" groups. Among those groups targeted for "neutralization" was the National Lawyers Guild.
A grand jury also discovered "a close working relation" among the Security Section, the Chicago-based 113th Military Intelligence Group, and the Legion of Justice, a local right-wing para-military terrorist group.
Terrence Knox, the Chicago police officer involved in the March 7, 1969 incident, has pursued Mr. Freeman in an obsessive manner. Although Knox was the officer involved in the incident, it has been Knox, and not an independent investigator, who has feverishly pursued the investigation. Knox was named as a defendant in this historic lawsuit.
The lawsuit was brought because of the Red Squad's pervasive surveillance, harassment, and infiltration of perfectly legal social groups involved in lawful, peaceful dissent around issues such as the Vietnam War, racism, and poverty. In response to the lawsuit, Chicago police immediately infiltrated the group that was suing them. One of the "control officers" who supervised these informants and provided them with cash payments was, according to court depositions, Terrence Knox. A 1984 grand jury verdict and 1985 court decision found the Chicago Police Subversive Activites Unit had acted unlawfully, violating numerous constitutional rights by maintaining extensive dossiers on countless individuals and legal political groups, by infiltrating the group that was suing the police, and by attempting, in the words of the police themselves, to "destroy the Spanish Action Committee of Chicago, its leader and its community influence."
This class action civil suit also included as defendants: Mayor Richard Daley, Chicago Police Board, Superintendant of Police James Rochford, "Red Squad" Commander Joe Grubisic, United States Department of Justice, The Federal Bureau of Investigation, Clarence Kelley (FBI Director), United States Central Intelligence Agency, Stansfield Turner (CIA Head) and various "Red Squad" members.
Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, in an August, 2005 Toronto Star interview, has urged Canada to refuse the extradition. "It is a clear sign of either over-zealous protection of police conduct or a vendetta by an individual officer to request extradition after a biblical generation against an alleged perpetrator who has long since embarked himself on a new and constructive life".
In the same interview, Ramsey Clark further stated that it's extremely important to think of the ugly state of race relations in Chicago in the late 1960s. "It was a time of fierce and excessive police violence against African-Americans - particularly those allegedly involved with the Black Panthers".
Could Gary Freeman receive a fair trial in present-day Chicago?
Although there were many changes in American society during the civil rights era, the years of Reagan, Clinton, and Bush I and Bush II have served as an attack on and rollback of those gains. A simple look at prison statistics reveals little has changed. The current U.S. rate of incarceration for African-American males is four times what it was under apartheid South Africa. Whereas white males are jailed at a rate of 649 per 100,000, black males are thrown into prison at a rate of 4,810 per 100,000 (as of June, 2002).
Amnesty International reports that "application of the death penalty in the United States is racially biased - and in some jurisdictions is reserved solely for non-white defendants," describing the U.S. justice system as "infected with racial prejudice."
Apart from the allegation of March, 1969, has Gary Freeman ever been involved in any activity which has led to allegations of violence?
None whatsoever.
Would it be safe to send Gary Freeman back to Chicago?
There are no guarantees in life, but if Mr. Freeman were to be sent back to Chicago, we have serious concerns about his personal safety. After all, upon his return to the United States, he would be placed in the custody of the Chicago Police, the same department found by the respected Human Rights Watch group to have engaged in acts of torture of suspects in custody. In their 1998 report, Shielded from Justice: Police Brutality and Accountability in the United States, the group noted "The People's Law Office, an activist firm, conducted an investigation and found and identified sixty-five suspects who were tortured by [Police Commander Jon] Burge or other officers and detectives between 1972 and 1991… A report by the police investigatory agency, the Office of Professional Standards (OPS), found that physical abuse 'did occur and that it was systemic…' The type of abuse described was not limited to the usual beating, but went into such esoteric areas as psychological techniques and planned torture. The evidence presented by some individuals convinced juries and appellate courts that personnel assigned to Area 2 engaged in methodical abuse."
The acknowledgement that police engaged in torture goes higher still, as then Republican Governor of Illinois George Ryan in 2003 pardoned numerous death row prisoners who said they had signed confessions tortured out of them by police under the direction of Police Commander Burge. CNN reported on January 14, 2003, that Burge "was fired after internal police investigators found systemic evidence of physical abuse of suspects. The four men 'were tortured,' the governor said. 'There isn't any question about that.'"
Since 1991, appellate courts have thrown out the murder confessions of at least 70 defendants in [Chicago's] Cook County - more than half because police arrested people with insufficient evidence before interrogating them. Taking people into custody without probable cause is both illegal and a precursor to many false confessions. But in Cook County, an appellate judge wrote last year, that prohibition is "routinely ignored." (from "Coercive and Illegal Tactics Torpedo Scores of Cook County Murder Cases", Chicago Tribune, December 16, 2001)
Our concern is that systemic abuse continues to occur, and that the allegations against Mr. Freeman would make him a prime target for police retaliation while in custody.
What about conditions at Cook County Jail?
After police custody, Mr. Freeman would likely be transferred to the notorious Cook County Jail, where countless human rights violations have been documented. The Chicago Tribune reported February 27, 2003, that in 1999, "an elite squad of 40 Cook County Jail guards invaded a maximum-security cellblock for the sole purpose of beating and terrorizing prisoners, then filed false reports to cover it up, according to Cook County sheriff's internal affairs documents, prisoner interviews and sheriff's sources."
What is the Extradition Act and is it a fair piece of legislation?
Dr. Gary Botting, Paetzold Fellow (LL.M., 1999; Ph.D., 2004) is the author of "Extradition Between Canada and the United States" and "Canadian Extradition Law Practice".
The following is Dr. Gary Botting's statement re: the constitutionality of the Extradition Act:
"The 1999 Extradition Act was clearly a product of the International Assistance Group of the Department of Justice which administers it. It was introduced to Parliament in 1998 without much fanfare by a parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Justice. Members of Parliament were told it would not only streamline extradition, it would also protect, in fact enhance, the rights of persons facing extradition. This was clearly a misrepresentation of its intention, for the person facing extradition has been stripped of virtually all meaningful rights.
Furthermore the courts no longer have a meaningful role in extradition at the initial phase, being required to accept as evidence a mere summary of the case presented by prosecuting authorities in the requesting country. Hence the superior courts which are assigned to "hear" extradition cases are required to rubber stamp the application of the attorney general to extradite any individual who is alleged to have committed an offence which might garner a maximum sentence of more than a year (section 3).
The Act has dropped the time-honoured notion that extradition should be reserved for crimes - any offence garnering such a penalty, criminal or otherwise, falls under the umbrella of the Act.
The peculiar rules of evidence demanding acceptance of the record of the case (sections 32 and 33) are in particular offensive to the integrity of Canada's judicial system and the constitution, since the role of the judiciary is undermined by the executive, and the superior court judges are reduced to the role of administrative clerks.
The Minister of Justice, who initially approves an "authority to proceed" with the extradition (section 15), is also the Attorney General, whose staff is charged with advancing the case through the courts. At the end of the proceeding, the Minister of Justice personally orders the surrender for extradition (section 40). Obviously, if the Minister has already ruled that the case should proceed, he should not also be in a position to determine that the extradition should succeed, especially given the fact that the intervening "judicial" hearing has been tied by the legislation to technicalities.
Judicial review of the Minister's decision is the first opportunity to challenge the new law, but appeal court judges consider themselves bound by whether the Minister has acted maliciously or patently unreasonably - a difficult test to meet. Therefore the only challenge to extradition that exists under the new system is constitutional challenge of the system itself. The overall scheme of the legislation is so patently unfair that eventually the Supreme Court of Canada should strike down significant parts of the Extradition Act, especially those parts dealing with evidence, and with the perceived apprehension of bias of the Minister of Justice/Attorney General in being both the prosecutor and the judge at every stage of the procedure."
Who was the victim in 1969?
Was this an incident of attempted murder or an incident of self-defence against a brutal attack following an over-zealous act of racial and political profiling?
Terrence Knox, a white Chicago police officer sustained a wound to his arm.
Joseph Pannell, a nineteen-year-old African-American, had his life destroyed. His basic human right of life and liberty was violated on the streets of Chicago in 1969.
Fear, scapegoating, and the atmosphere in the United States?
The United States is a fearful country right now. It is running around the world, trying to find easy scapegoats for all the problems it faces at home (from the inability to convince Iraqis that they should hand over their country to U.S. oil companies to skyrocketing rates of poverty and domestic misery). The U.S. is waging a war on freedom called the War on Terror, which it has used to justify the detention of some 5,000 individuals since the tragic events of September 11, 2001. Of those detentions, as David Cole points out, "Ashcroft's record is 0 for 5,000. When the Attorney General was locking these men up in the immediate wake of the attacks, he held almost daily press conferences to announce how many 'suspected terrorists' had been detained. No press conference has been forthcoming to announce that exactly none of them have turned out to be actual terrorists. "(The Nation, Oct 4, 2004)
The gap between rhetoric and reality is one which the Bush administration is constantly trying to bridge. If all these folks are such threats, why has no one been convicted? Can this war on terror be a sham? Instead, they are digging up any case they can, especially from the 1960s, to show how much law and order remain the mainstay of the land.
So draft resisters and military folks who went AWOL in 1968 are suddenly being busted in various parts of the country 35 years later.
The American establishment especially has a special hate on for the 1960s. It is either denied or made the focus of vicious re-writing. To be someone looking through the eyes of the media at the 1960s is to see a bunch of white kids wearing jeans, growing long hair, smoking dope, and either going to Woodstock or watching the first moonwalk. Wow, man.
Neglected from the sixties is the 1950s, the birth of the civil rights movement, the movements for national liberation in Vietnam, in the U.S. south and northern ghettoes. The Kerner Commission found the United States to be two nations, separate and unequal, based on a deep-seated racism made all the more intense by the white power structure's backlash against forces for change through programs such as COINTELPRO.
The Freeman case fits nicely into this paradigm of finding someone, somehow, somewhere, who fits the bill of meeting the description of America's nightmare (and saviour for the forces of law and order). In this case, it represents the much-maligned, little-understood Black Panthers, of whom Freeman was never a member, but media reports continually trumpet that he was a member of this "militant" or "extremist" group, to remind people that it may be linked to the all-pervasive Terror thing that keeps some segments of the population scared, at home, with rolls of duct tape (in much the same ways some Americans took up the advice of the Reagan administration's, who suggested that nuclear war could be survived with a shovel, a door, and some dirt. Dig a hole, crawl in, and pull a door over you piled high with dirt. It's the manure that does it, we were assured at the time).
Please end the suffering of a Canadian family!
Canada represents itself as a beacon of democracy. Its leaders speak on the world stage about the importance of certain core values, among which one of the most important is the concept of keeping families together. Indeed, both the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Canada is a signatory, say the same thing about the family: The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.
Please end the suffering of this Canadian family. Protect them from further suffering by freeing their loved one from jail and keeping him here in Canada where he belongs.