from 2017
"The perjury charge against Brian Encinia has been dismissed by state District Judge Albert McCaig in Waller County based on a motion for dismissal by the prosecution. Brian and his family appreciate the thoughtful review by the prosecutors"
"The state trooper... was cleared of all charges by [the] Texas judge on Wednesday, the New York Times reports.
Back in July 2015, Brian Encinia pulled Bland over for a routine traffic stop. In dashcam footage of the incident, Encinia was seen violently slamming Bland into the ground, though he was never charged with assault. Likewise, no one was ever charged when Bland was found dead in a county jail cell three days after she was taken into custody. A medical examiner ruled her death was a suicide.
After the incident, Encinia initially claimed that he pulled Bland out of her car so that he could more safely conduct the stop when she failed to use a turning signal. A grand jury found that to be false and indicted him on a perjury charge..."
~VICE
This is the bad news.
The good news is that prosecutors can be removed by the voters and black voters have already successfully done so in Chicago, Illinois and Florida.
The other piece of good news is pressure can be brought to bear to remove judges from criminal court even if it's hard to get them fired.
The voters in Texas need to get together and take action too.
The way we support Texas voters from outside the state is to express outrage enough for Sandra Bland's name to rise to national prominence again. We have to let the Texas voters know they CAN do something.
And the rest of us can't just be outraged in our own homes, screaming "AGAIN!" at the ceiling.
More to the point, I'm really becoming more and more convinced that Black Lives Matter is not centrally organized enough to organize the second-level protests needed. AFTER the initial emotional outrage has passed the proudly leader-less Black Lives Matter does not coalesce again for the dismissed charges / not guilty verdict.
Again and again, we're watching white judges and white prosecutors protect white and/or pale officers who attack and kill unarmed black people. And we, via Black Lives Matter, rarely raise up a second time when the prosecutor does a better job defending the cop than the cop's defense attorney.
The judge(?) and the prosecutor(?) allowed/enabled the Sandra Bland case to be delayed and delayed and delayed until it was out of public view -- standard white operating procedure across the nation. So as famous as Sandra Bland's case was, we didn't get nationwide attention on the fact that Brian Encinia's charges were dismissed immediately. His charges were dismissed last Wednesday. The news is trickling out, it seems to me. And I'm actually wondering if 80% of people in Texas even know the charges were dismissed at all.
If the black and brown people, at the very least, don't know of this latest outrage how can a black and brown led voter group rise out of the protesters and remove the prosecutor just like they did in Cincinnati?
We need Black Lives Matter. And maybe we need it just the way it is. It's young and it's fast when that's necessary on the front end, immediately after someone has been murdered by police. But we need another, more political group that is more media savvy which has a charismatic leader.
Only a leader can pull people together and motivate them when spirits are all but broken. A group with a leader can pull the leader of the voter groups from Cincinnati, Ohio and Florida and help remove and punish a prosecutor that's acting like the cop's defense attorney.
At this point we have to admit that people are human and need to reinvigorated. Those that would shame the ordinary black folks that go to the first protest but not the second or third when court decisions and verdicts are wrong. We have to use our emotional intelligence to evaluate what is not working. And I say the thing that's not working is absence of a few well placed, highly visible leaders.
It may be bad to have movements that can die because of the deaths or arrests of a few charismatic leaders (as Civil Rights Leader Ella Baker suggested decades ago. And she seems to have been proven right as I look at the deaths of Martin Luther King, Malcom X, and the Black Panthers' Fred Hampton) But it is worse to have an unfocused movement that an easily dissipate when frustration is high and/or be kind of random about how and where it shows up -- not for black women very often.
headline
Group condemns dropped charge in Sandra Bland case
(Sandra Bland own voice can be heard at end of this press conference held on behalf of black women victims)
http://abc13.com/news/group-condemns-dropped-charge-in-sandra-bland-case/2160391/
BLACKCHICKROCKED.BLOGSPOT.COM
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