Hong Kong DJ Convicted of Sedition in Watershed Trial

HONG KONG — 

A pro-democracy Hong Kong radio DJ was convicted of seditious speech on Wednesday under a British colonial-era law that authorities have embraced as China flattens dissent in the business hub.

Tam Tak-chi, 49, is among a growing number of activists charged with sedition, a previously little-used law that prosecutors have dusted off in the wake of massive and sometimes violent pro-democracy protests in 2019.

Tam’s trial was the first since Hong Kong’s 1997 handover in which a sedition defendant fought his case by pleading not guilty and went through a full trial.

Two previous recent prosecutions were wrapped up after guilty pleas.

As a result, Tam’s conviction is a legal watershed because it sets precedents for a host of upcoming sedition prosecutions as China remolds Hong Kong in its own authoritarian image.

Better known by his moniker “Fast Beat,” Tak hosted a popular online talk show that backed democracy and was highly critical of the government, often using colorful language.

He was a regular presence at protests and often set up street booths to deliver political speeches.

Prosecutors focused on the street booths, with Tam convicted on seven counts of “uttering seditious words” as well as other charges such as disorderly conduct and disobeying a police officer.

Authorities said Tam incited hatred against the authorities by chanting the popular protest slogan “Liberate Hong Kong, Revolution of Our Times” 171 times, cursing the police force some 120 times, and repeatedly shouting “Down with the Communist Party.”

“The attack on the Communist Party is only part of the seditious words uttered by the accused,” district judge Stanley Chan said in his verdict.

“Looking at what he (Tam) said, it’s far beyond criticizing and theorizing,” he added.

Sedition is separate from the sweeping national security law that Beijing imposed on Hong Kong in 2020.

But the courts treat it with the same severity and there are plans to make sedition one of a number of new national security crimes later this year, meaning it will soon carry a much longer jail term.

Tam was arrested in September 2020 and denied bail, as happens in most national security cases.

His trial began in July 2021 but was delayed for a landmark High Court ruling in which judges declared the popular protest slogan “Liberate Hong Kong” was secessionist and therefore illegal under the new security law.

That ruling legally crystallized the reality that certain views and slogans are now forbidden in Hong Kong under the security law.

In Hong Kong, sedition is broadly defined as any words that generate “hatred, contempt or disaffection” towards the government or “encourage disaffection” among residents.

It carries up to two years in jail for a first offense.

First penned by colonial ruler Britain in 1938, it was long criticized as an anti-free speech law, including by many of the pro-Beijing local newspapers now praising its use.

By the time of the 1997 handover, it had not been used for decades but remained on the books.

On the same day Tam was convicted, police charged two men aged 17 and 19 with “uttering seditious words” in a separate case concerning a campus protest in 2020.

In recent months, sedition charges have been brought against pro-democracy unionists who produced euphemistic children’s books about a village of sheep defending itself from wolves; journalists from now-shuttered pro-democracy news outlets; and a former pop star turned democracy activist.

In January, a man was jailed for eight months and a woman 13-and-a-half months after pleading guilty in two separate cases over seditious leaflets.

Verdict in First Trial of Jan. 6 Defendant Could Lead to More Trials

A year ago, an angry mob stormed the same building where on Tuesday night President Joe Biden gave his first State of the Union address. More than 750 people have been arrested in that attack on the U.S. Capitol, and 218 have pleaded guilty so far. But only one person has decided to go to trial. VOA’s senior Washington correspondent Carolyn Presutti shows us exactly what he did that day and tells us why so many will be watching the jury’s verdict.

Hate Crimes Trial Goes to Jury After Prosecutors Say 'Racial Hatred' Drove Ahmaud Arbery's Murderers

BRUNSWICK, Ga — 

The three white men convicted of murdering Ahmaud Arbery acted out of “racial anger” when they chased down the young Black man as they saw him jogging through their Georgia community, a federal prosecutor told jurors at the defendants’ hate-crimes trial Monday.

Defense lawyers argued that their clients, despite a lengthy record of bigoted social discourse shown in court, pursued Arbery because they were suspicious of his conduct, not because of his race.

Judge Lisa Wood sent the predominantly white jury out to deliberate Monday afternoon after they listened to hours of closing arguments in a case probing whether vigilantism directed against a Black person in this case crossed the boundary of racially motivated violence as defined by U.S. law.

The defendants – Travis McMichael, 36; his father, Gregory McMichael, 66; and neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan, 52 – have already been convicted of murder in state court and sentenced to life in prison in an earlier trial that largely skirted racial issues and focused on proving a homicide case.

Arbery, 25, was out for an afternoon jog on Feb. 23, 2020, when the McMichaels spotted him running by their home, grabbed their guns and jumped in their pickup truck to follow him. Bryan joined the chase in his own truck before Aubrey was cornered and confronted face to face by the younger McMichael, who fired three shotgun blasts at Aubrey at close range, killing him.

Arbery’s name became entwined with a host of others invoked in protests that swept the country after an unarmed Black man in Minneapolis, George Floyd, was killed by a white police officer kneeling on Floyd’s neck until he could no longer breathe in May 2020.

The federal prosecution of Arbery’s killers marks the first instance in which those convicted of such a high-profile murder are facing a jury in a hate-crimes trial.

Christopher Perras, a special litigator for the U.S. Justice Department’s civil rights division, said in his summation Monday that Arbery was singled out by the defendants because of the color of his skin.

“They were motivated by racial assumption, racial resentment and racial anger,” Perras said, referring to the defendants. “They saw a Black man in their neighborhood and they thought the worst of him.”

Perras cited trial testimony showing the defendants had a long history of making overtly, sometimes violently racist comments about Black people in text messages, social media and conversations with others.

The proceedings were attending on Monday by several members of Arbery’s family, including his parents, Marcus Arbery Sr., and Wanda Coooper-Jones.

Defense attorneys countered that their clients believed they recognized Arbery from previous videos taken by a neighbor showing a person lurking on four occasions around a vacant house under construction amid a series of property thefts in the community.

“If you ask, ‘Would these defendants have grabbed guns and done this to a white guy?’ and the answer is yes,” said defense lawyer Amy Lee Copeland, representing Travis McMichael, the man who fired the three shotgun blasts that killed Arbery.

She and fellow defense lawyers said the record of past derogatory statements made by her clients about Black people failed to prove their actions on the day of Arbery’s killing were racially motivated.

Copeland said prosecutors presented no evidence that her client “ever spoke to anyone about Mr. Arbery in racial terms” or used a racial slur on the day of the killing. And she added that the government never connected McMichael to any white supremacist or hate groups.

A.J. Balbo, the attorney Gregory McMichael, argued that the defendants were motivated by a desire to protect their neighborhood.

Pete Theodocion, Bryan’s attorney, argued the evidence of racism was merely “circumstantial.”

“Yes, the N-word six times is six times too many, but it is not evidence (of a hate crime),” he told jurors.

All three men are charged with depriving Arbery of his civil rights by attacking him because of his race, as well as with attempted kidnapping. The McMichaels are additionally charged with a federal firearms offense.

The hate-crimes felony, the most serious of the charges, carries a maximum penalty of life in prison.

Both McMichaels had agreed last month to plead guilty to the federal hate-crimes offense, and the son acknowledged in court that he singled out Arbery because of his “race and color.”

But Judge Wood rejected the plea bargain because it bound her to a 30-year sentence that prosecutors had agreed would be served in a federal lockup before the men were returned to the Georgia prison system, widely perceived as a tougher environment for inmates compared with federal penitentiaries.

The plea deals were then withdrawn, and all three defendants proceeded to trial.

Alleged Leader of US-Based Iran Militant Group Goes on Trial

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — 

The alleged leader of the militant wing of a U.S.-based Iranian opposition group went on trial Sunday, state TV reported. He’s accused of planning a 2008 bombing at a mosque that killed 14 people and wounded over 200.

In 2020, Iran’s intelligence service detained Jamshid Sharmahd, an Iranian-German national and U.S. resident. Iran said he is the leader of Tondar, the militant wing of the opposition group Kingdom Assembly of Iran.

Sharmahd’s family says he is only the spokesperson for the Kingdom Assembly of Iran, known in Farsi as Anjoman-e Padeshahi-e Iran, and has accused Iran of kidnapping him in Dubai. His hometown is Glendora, California.

Sharmahd confessed to having a relationship with both the FBI and the CIA, state TV alleged. A state TV reporter claimed he was in contact with nine FBI and CIA agents and his last meeting was in January 2020, without elaborating.

Iranian state television long has been believed to be overseen by intelligence agencies in the country and its channels routinely broadcast coerced confessions.

Sharmahd’s family has accused Iran of keeping their father in “555 days of solitary confinement without charges” prior to the hearing.

At the time of his detention, Iran alleged Sharmahd was behind the 2008 bombing that targeted the Hosseynieh Seyed al-Shohada Mosque in the city of Shiraz and that he was planning other attacks around Iran. Besides the 14 killed in the bombing, 215 were wounded.

Sharmahd, who supports restoring Iran’s monarchy that was overthrown in the 1979 Islamic Revolution, had been previously targeted in an apparent Iranian assassination plot on U.S. soil in 2009.

Iran hasn’t said how it detained Sharmahd, which came against the backdrop of covert actions conducted by Iran amid heightened tensions with the U.S. over Tehran’s collapsing nuclear deal with world powers.

Sharmahd had been in Dubai, trying to travel to India for a business deal involving his software company, his son said. He was hoping to get a connecting flight despite the ongoing coronavirus pandemic disrupting global travel.

Western officials believe Iran runs intelligence operations in Dubai and keeps tabs on the hundreds of thousands of Iranians living in the city-state. Iran is suspected of kidnapping and later killing British-Iranian national Abbas Yazdi in Dubai in 2013, though Tehran has denied involvement.

The U.S. State Department runs its Iran Regional Presence Office in Dubai, where diplomats monitor Iranian media reports and talk to Iranians.

Dubai’s hotels long have been targeted by intelligence operatives, such as in the suspected 2010 assassination by the Israeli Mossad of Hamas operative Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. Dubai and the rest of the UAE have since invested even more in an elaborate surveillance network.

The Kingdom Assembly of Iran seeks to restore Iran’s monarchy, which ended when the fatally ill Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi fled the country in 1979 just before the Islamic Revolution. The group’s founder disappeared in the mid-2000s.

Last week, Iran said its intelligence units arrested the No. 2 leader of Tondar, or “Thunder” in Farsi, identified only as “Masmatus.”

Iran has also accused the group of being behind a 2010 bombing at Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s mausoleum in Tehran that wounded several people.

State TV said some family members of victims of the mosque bombing attended Sunday’s hearing, which was presided over by Judge Abolghasem Salavati in Revolutionary Court 15 in the capital, Tehran.

Media Asks Court to Ensure Access to Trial Over Floyd Death

A coalition of media organizations has asked a federal appeals court to intervene to ensure public access to the trial of three former Minneapolis police officers charged with violating George Floyd’s civil rights.

The news organizations, including The Associated Press, petitioned the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday to quash two orders from District Judge Paul Magnuson that they say violated the First Amendment by closing part of the trial and sealing the corresponding transcript.

Monday was the start of the second week of testimony in the trial, which Magnuson has said could last four weeks.

“Petitioners do not need to explain to this Court the gravity of the trial, the impact Mr. Floyd’s death had on the Twin Cities and the world, or the public’s ongoing and intense concern for how the criminal justice system deals with those accused of killing him,” media coalition attorney Leita Walker wrote. “As a result, ensuring the trial is fully open to the press and public is imperative.”

At issue is Magnuson’s closure of a hearing that he planned for January 21 on defense motions to exclude certain evidence. Prosecutors and the media coalition objected to the closure.

Walker wrote that the judge appeared to cancel the hearing, but then held what was first called a “trial management conference” that the court later labeled an “in-chambers proceeding.”

Both were conducted in private.

Magnuson rejected the media coalition’s challenge of the closure as “moot” after he canceled it.

In a written order after he was asked to reconsider, he stood by his earlier decision, writing that the proceeding in chambers “was not a hearing at all” and that neither the public nor media had a right to access it.

He also sealed the proceeding’s transcript, which he said was brief and of no import. Its release would be “contrary to the efficient administration of justice in this matter,” Magnuson wrote.

The coalition asked the 8th Circuit to vacate the closure order and unseal the transcript. The news organizations also repeated concerns they’ve been raising about restrictions on journalists and spectators in the courtroom that are meant to reduce the risks of a COVID-19 outbreak disrupting the proceedings.

Trial Begins for Cops Accused of Violating George Floyd's Rights

ST. PAUL, MINN. — 

The federal trial for three former Minneapolis police officers charged with violating George Floyd’s civil rights as Derek Chauvin pinned the Black man’s neck to the street began Monday with opening statements, after a jury of 18 people was swiftly picked last week.

J. Kueng, Thomas Lane and Tou Thao are broadly charged with depriving Floyd of his civil rights while acting under government authority. All three are charged for failing to provide Floyd with medical care and Thao and Kueng face an additional count for failing to stop Chauvin, who was convicted of murder and manslaughter in state court last year.

FILE – Former Minneapolis police officers J. Alexander Kueng, Thomas Lane and Tou Thao are seen in this combination of photos provided by the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office in Minnesota on June 3, 2020.

Legal experts say prosecutors have to prove Kueng, Lane and Thao willfully violated Floyd’s constitutional rights, while defense attorneys are likely to blame Chauvin for Floyd’s murder, which was videotaped and triggered worldwide protests, violence and a reexamination of racism and policing.

FILE – Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin sits in front of a picture of George Floyd displayed during Chauvin’s trial for second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter in the death of Floyd in Minneapolis.

Floyd, 46, died on May 25, 2020, after Chauvin pressed him to the ground with his knee on Floyd’s neck for 9 1/2 minutes while Floyd was facedown, handcuffed and gasping for air. Kueng knelt on Floyd’s back and Lane held down his legs. Thao kept bystanders from intervening.

Attorneys for the Floyd family have said bystander video shows that the three officers “directly contributed to [Floyd’s] death and failed to intervene to stop the senseless murder.”

On Thursday, 18 people were chosen for the jury; 12 will deliberate and six will be alternates. Two of the jurors — one expected to deliberate and one alternate — appear to be of Asian descent. The rest appear to be white. The jurors include people from the Twin Cities area, the suburbs and southern Minnesota. The court declined to provide demographic information.

Federal prosecutions of officers involved in on-duty killings are rare. Prosecutors face a high legal standard to show that an officer willfully deprived someone of their constitutional rights. Essentially, prosecutors must prove that the officers knew what they were doing was wrong, but did it anyway.

The indictment charges Thao, who is Hmong American; Lane, who is white; and Kueng, who is Black, with willfully depriving Floyd of the right to be free from an officer’s deliberate indifference to his medical needs. The indictment says the three men saw Floyd clearly needed medical care and failed to aid him.

Thao and Kueng are also charged with a second count alleging they willfully violated Floyd’s right to be free from unreasonable seizure by not stopping Chauvin as he knelt on Floyd’s neck. It’s not clear why Lane is not mentioned in that count, but evidence shows he asked twice whether Floyd should be rolled on his side.

Both counts allege the officers’ actions resulted in Floyd’s death.

U.S. District Judge Magnuson told jurors that the trial could last four weeks. It’s not known whether any of the three officers will testify. It’s also not clear whether Chauvin will testify, though many experts who spoke to The Associated Press believe he won’t.

Lane, Kueng and Thao also face a separate state trial in June on charges they aided and abetted both murder and manslaughter.