Page 6 - Florida Sentinel 12-31-19

Political News
Barack Obama Spends Holiday Break Playing Golf And Kissing Babies In Hawaii
BARACK OBAMA IN HAWAII
Progress On Obama Presidential Center In Chicago Has Reportedly Stalled
Barack Obama was spot- ted living his best life while golfing in Hawaii last week, right around the time Don- ald Trump was in the process of being impeached.
In photos first obtained by TMZ, the former president was spotted in his home state at Mid-Pacific Country Club, while enjoying his annual hol- iday break in Oahu, Hawaii.
In one photo, Obama met
a mother and her baby Levi after he finished a round of golf and signed autographs for onlookers.
“As I watched him hold my son, my heart overflowed. He was so genuine and so gentle with my son, Levi,” mom Krystle Ilar told HuffPost. In a video of Levi and Obama, you can see him shake the baby’s hand and holding him.
Early on in the planning for the Obama Presidential Center, officials were opti- mistic. Representatives from the Obama Foundation pre- dicted the campus, to be housed in Jackson Park on Chicago’s South Side, would break ground on construc- tion in 2018. The expectation was, by 2021, the massive center would be completed.
But as the Chicago Trib- une reports, work on the Presidential Center appears to be at a standstill: ground has not been broken on the $500 million project (nor is there a new date), and there is no updated schedule for when the center will finally open.
According to the Tribune, the delay can be partially ex- plained by a federal review process that has crawled along. But while the review
BARACK OBAMA
process is cumbersome, it doesn’t completely explain the project’s current post- ponement:
The federal review is tak- ing place because Jackson Park is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and because the development involves closing and expand- ing major streets. There have
been public meetings as part of the review process, and a report examining how the de- velopment will impact the park was released in July.
But for four months, there have been no updates, and at least two major events have been delayed without expla- nation, officials involved with the review said.
This Man Has Been In Prison
Chicago Man Freed From Prison 29 Years After Being Tortured Into False Confession
For The Past 38 Years Since
After spending 29 years in prison, a wrongfully con- victed Chicago man is back home with his family. De- mond Weston was exoner- ated of charges including murder, and released from Dixon Correctional Center on Thursday (Dec. 19), end- ing a freedom fight that spanned much of his adult life.
At age 17, Weston falsely confessed to murder follow- ing a 12-hour interrogation and torture session helmed by disgraced former Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge, who between 1972 and 1991, led a group of po- lice officers known as the “Midnight Crew” that sys- tematically tortured more than 100 black men and women into false confes- sions.
The torture tactics in- cluded suffocation, beatings, burnings, and electric shocks to victims' genitals. Burge was eventually sentenced to four and half years for per-
He Was Sentenced To Life
For Stealing $9 In 1982
Back in 1977, the Alabama Legislature passed the Habit- ual Felony Offender Act to crack down on repeat crimi- nals. According to the Depart- ment of Corrections, at that time, the prison population was 3,455. After a decade, this number skyrocketed to 13,541. And fast-forward to 2014 – the number of prisoners has in- creased by 840 percent, to 32,467.
Investigative journalist Beth Shelburne recently shared the story of a man cur- rently imprisoned in one of Al- abama’s most notorious prisons. She talked to Willie Simmons – a man who got a life sentence without parole – to shed light on the injustice created by the “habitual of- fender” laws.
“Today I talked to Willie Simmons, who has spent the
DEMOND WESTON
WILLIE SIMMONS
last 38 years in prison for stealing $9,” Beth began her Twitter thread. Willie Sim- mons is a man from the small town of Enterprise, Alabama. He got into hard drugs when he was just a teenager. When he was 25, “the state said he should die in prison.
jury and obstruction of jus- tice, in relation to a civil law- suit filed by Madison Hobley, a wrongfully con- victed black man who was tortured into a confession and sentenced to death for a 1987 apartment fire that claimed the lives of his wife, son and five others. Burge was released from prison in 2014. He died last year.
Weston was falsely con- victed in 1991 for the fatal shooting of one man, and in- volvement in three addi-
tional shootings. He main- tained his innocence over the nearly three decades that he spent behind bars. After re- examining the case, Cook County prosecutors con- firmed Weston's innocence and requested that his con- victions be vacated on Wednesday (Dec. 18). The torture allegations did not play into the conclusion, however, Weston can pur- sue a civil lawsuit against the state of Illinois for torture and wrongful conviction.
PAGE 6 FLORIDA SENTINEL BULLETIN PUBLISHED EVERY TUESDAY AND FRIDAY TUESDAY, DECEMBER 31, 2019