I've lived in Champaign for many years and have friends and family in the community.  I fully support CUCPJ in the efforts being made in this case. I have never seen anyone in the organization advocate riots or unlawful protests.  The unity marches and the recent gathering at the Champaign County Courthouse did not disrupt the flow of traffic or bar entrance into the facility. People who were going about their usual business were not approached or accosted by anyone who attended these functions.

It is not slander or libel to utilize published reports and documents obtained through the Freedom on Information Act to ask questions on how this situation has been investigated and handled. In fact I think it's a disgrace that the one for profit newspaper in this community has failed to engage in the type of investigative journalism this situation calls for.

Who is the 'poor young man' you speak of? Would it be RT Finney or Officer Norbits? Being a member of law enforcement is a thankless job and I understand that this must of been a very trying situation for the two men. However, as public servants, there are questions over their conduct that day and they must be held to a professional standard.  Both Finney and Norbits should have been on administrative leave since this situation occurred and their presence during the investigation was improper.

This community is torn apart, not by individuals looking for the truth, but by the trusted servants who abuse the power that has been given to them. It shows in the concern of mothers who are afraid to let their sons walk to the convenience store or high school because she is scared of what the police might do. It shows in the story of a former neighbor of mine who told me that her biracial nephew had his nose broken by police officers.  It shows when concerned citizens go to the city council and get treated to smirks and rudeness by the mayor, who is a former police officer.

What is, in your opinion, responsible activism? You ask people to stand their ground and to do so with intelligence and compassion.  The intelligence is something that comes from the fact that people have examined the information that has been made available very very carefully.  While CUCPJ has stood its ground firmly I have yet to see any unkindness directed towards any of the parties. It also takes a lot of compassion to consider what happened to young Carrington and his friend that day instead of dismissing them as a couple of uppity black kids who probably deserved what they got.

Lets talk about setting an example: a recent teach in held by CUCPJ talked about the lessons we can teach young people. First - youth in this community need to know what their rights are and how to respond when stopped by law enforcement. Second - instead of complaining about the system we need to encourage young men and women to become part of the system by becoming city council members, police officers, and even lawyers. There is a lot of discussion on how young people can be encouraged to become active and involved in the democratic process so their voices can be heard. This is not something the News-Gazette covers and I encourage you to attend a meeting of CUCPJ at the IMC on Saturdays at 4PM.

I beg you to examine the values you are asking me, and others, to review. Please make an effort to become part of the solution and not an ongoing part of the problem by hiding behind anonymous posts on the Internet. Because I have publicly put myself and my own name out in the public sphere there are times when I do get scared for myself and my own family.  If there is anyone who is doing this simply for some narcissistic public attention....that is just plain crazy. Standing ones ground in the face of injustice is not an easy thing to do...especially when the more comfortable thing to do is to simply walk away and refuse to rock the boat.

Even more inflammatory than the shooting itself is the cover-up -

and with the help of a prosecuter who has recused herself previously because of her boyfriend the cop!

It is CUCPJ that seeks kindness and compassion of which there seems to be precious little among the entrenched powers in your little cowtown.

Too bad we can't pick up the University and move it elsewhere.

David Roknich

Galesburg, Illinois -

where we too are addressing the problem of bureaucrats gone bad!

by Ellen Barry

MOSCOW — It was more than a year ago when six members of an obscure oversight panel filed into Butyrskaya Prison to look into the death of a prisoner.

They were hardly an intimidating bunch: retired women in hats, mostly, scribbling their observations in notebooks, regarded by the prison staff as a minor irritant, like fleas.

In a country whose law enforcement structures wield enormous power, it is easy enough to ignore civilian watchdog groups. But this day was different. When the doctors were led in and told to take a seat, the panel’s leader, a veteran human rights activist named Valery V. Borshchev, felt something unfamiliar in the air.

“They lied to us, of course,” Mr. Borshchev later recalled. “But they were frightened. And the fact that they were frightened gave us hope that something would really change.”

The man who had died was Sergei L. Magnitsky. His death in pretrial detention at the age of 37, officially recorded as resulting from sudden heart failure, sent shudders through Moscow’s elite. They saw him — a post-Soviet young urban professional — as someone uncomfortably like themselves. He had been arrested after accusing police investigators of a huge tax fraud, and he died awaiting trial.

A full account of Mr. Magnitsky’s death, the group knew, could restore some confidence in Russia’s legal system. A whitewash, on the other hand, could erode what faith remained.

Investigating the death meant confronting Russia’s security structures — the police, prosecutors, courts, prisons and prison doctors, all links in a self-protective chain. The findings, however decisive, would have to compete with an official inquiry, which would ultimately determine if anyone would be prosecuted.

Even so, they felt oddly hopeful. President Dmitri A. Medvedev, by all accounts genuinely angry over Mr. Magnitsky’s death, insisted that state prosecutors stop dragging their feet and open a case. Two days later, a top prison administrator admitted “obvious violations on our part” to a Kremlin advisory group.

In a country ruled more by commands than by laws, a command had gone out: This time someone would have to be punished.

So the inspectors walked into Butyrskaya with uncommon confidence.

“We could cover ourselves with this comment and say, ‘The president demanded an investigation,’ ” said Lyubov V. Volkova, deputy head of the panel, known as the Public Oversight Commission. “It was like an umbrella. We could go in and say, show us this, show us that. We are under this umbrella.”

Unlikely Detectives

Ms. Volkova and her colleagues were hardly detectives. Their group was brand new, approved by Mr. Medvedev after more than a decade of lobbying the government. They were empowered to inspect cells and investigate complaints, but their recommendations were not binding. In their berets and reading glasses, they seemed to pose little threat. But once inside Butyrskaya, the commission members were neck deep in a criminal investigation.

They moved from cell to cell, standing in the last spaces Mr. Magnitsky had occupied, seeing the last people he saw. They paged through sheaves of complaints he made: there were more than 400, as many as three a day, sometimes written by hand. The picture of a man began to take shape before them.

“Every day, in prisons, we see beaten, constrained, terrified people, who don’t complain about anything,” said Ms. Volkova, 62, a brash blonde partial to satin pants and animal prints. “Magnitsky complained. And the more he complained, the worse they made it for him. And then he complained again.”

“He is the only one we’ve seen like this,” she said.

There were signs that something had gone badly wrong. A doctor on the prison’s medical staff who had been treating Mr. Magnitsky for abdominal pain appeared more distraught than others interviewed by the group. Three days before his death, she told them, Mr. Magnitsky complained about vomiting and severe pain on his right side.

That was a Friday, and she went home for the weekend. No doctor saw him again until Monday, and then, she said, he had “acute, belting pain, vomiting every three hours.” It looked to her as if he had acute pancreatitis, which left untreated can lead to organ failure. As the commission members hastily took notes, the doctor described her alarm, saying: “It was necessary to push for an examination. I thought he had a chronic disease.”

At this, the commission members’ ears pricked up. Whom did she have to lobby to get Mr. Magnitsky treated?

But the conversation was cut short. At that moment, Mr. Borshchev recalled, a prison official walked up behind the doctor, grasped her by the shoulders, and took her out of the room.

Tracing a Prisoner’s Journey

Mr. Borshchev learned about prisons in the 1970s, when, as a close friend of the Soviet dissident Andrei D. Sakharov, he ferried books and sausages to the outskirts of penal colonies to be passed to political prisoners. From his own interrogations for dissident activities, he knew that a prisoner needed a plan to withstand official pressure. He had his own plan: As soon as the investigator raised his voice, he would stop talking and gaze out the window.

Now 76, Mr. Borshchev has fat streaks of white in his beard, and peers over his glasses as if he is presiding over his own personal Supreme Court.

At Butyrskaya, he walked from one cell to another, tracing eight transfers Mr. Magnitsky underwent in the last three months of his life. The cells were increasingly cramped, dark and dirty.

Though a prison doctor had diagnosed gallstones and pancreatitis and ordered a follow-up ultrasound, Mr. Magnitsky was suddenly transferred to Butyrskaya, which had minimal medical facilities. There he had an attack, writing of pain “so acute that I was not even able to lie down.” In September, Oleg F. Silchenko, lead investigator in the case, refused Mr. Magnitsky’s appeal to advocate for the ultrasound, saying investigators were under no obligation to intervene. The ultrasound never happened.

Mr. Magnitsky was allowed only one visit with his wife and mother for the full 11 months he was in custody; they attended court hearings so they could stare at him from across the room. He passed the time by reading Shakespeare’s tragedies. When overcome with anxiety or despair, a cellmate later said, he would turn his face to the wall, as if he wanted it to swallow him up.

To Mr. Borshchev, there was only one way to interpret this: the prisoner was refusing to cooperate. Indeed, Mr. Magnitsky’s job at a Russian-American law firm drew him into a battle between William S. Browder — once the largest foreign investor in the Russian stock market — and the Interior Ministry, which oversees law enforcement. In 2007, Mr. Browder’s company, Hermitage Capital, based on Mr. Magnitsky’s research, accused police investigators of an immense act of corruption, charging that they had seized three of Mr. Browder’s subsidiary companies and used them to receive a $230 million tax refund.

The next year, the Interior Ministry charged Mr. Browder’s companies with evading $17.5 million in taxes. As soon as Mr. Magnitsky was arrested, investigators were pushing him to testify against someone, presumably Mr. Browder, said his defense lawyer, Dmitri V. Kharitonov. But he refused.

The commission’s narrative flowed with some logic until it reached Nov. 16, 2009, the day he died. The nervous doctor sent Mr. Magnitsky to another prison, which had a hospital. There, the oversight panel met a surgeon named Dr. Aleksandra V. Gaus, who said she noted upon his arrival that he had symptoms of acute pancreatitis and prepared to send him for treatment.

At 7 p.m., Dr. Gaus said, he started to act erratically, and she changed her mind, determining that he was suffering from “acute psychosis and persecutory delusions.” She called a team of eight guards to forcibly subdue him, and they handcuffed him to the bed in an isolation cell to wait for a psychiatric emergency team. An hour and a half later, officials said, he collapsed when the psychiatrist was examining him, and was rushed to intensive care for resuscitation. He was declared dead at 9:50 p.m.

Mr. Borshchev was mulling over this account when he got a startling phone call. A few days earlier, he had left his card for the psychiatrist who was present at Mr. Magnitsky’s death. On the phone was the psychiatrist, Dr. Vitaly V. Kornilov, who told a different story: He and his team had been forced to wait at the clinic’s outer gates for a full hour — roughly from 8 until 9 p.m. — before they were allowed inside.

By the time he entered the cell, as Dr. Kornilov would later tell the official investigators, “we were presented with the fact that we could not carry out a psychiatric examination because of the lack of a patient.”

“The head of the corpse was tilted toward his left shoulder, his eyes were open and wide,” he said, according to official documents. “No heartbeat could be felt, no breath or arterial pressure was felt, his skin was pale and cool. Biological death had occurred 15 minutes before.”

The Panel Reports

Six weeks after Mr. Magnitsky’s death, Mr. Borshchev published the commission’s report. He was pleased; though there were still gaps and contradictions, he was sure the commission had uncovered enough to show that someone could be charged, if only for negligence. “When undesirable information gets into the case file, it starts working by itself,” he said. “It must be disproved or else unraveled.”

But another inquiry — the official one — was taking place out of public view. Around 12 hours after Mr. Magnitsky died, his body was examined by a coroner who reported that Mr. Magnitsky’s death was as sudden and unpredictable as a lightning strike. In her report, a copy of which was reviewed by The New York Times, she listed the cause of death as heart failure as a result of dilated cardiomyopathy, a disease that sometimes makes headlines when young athletes collapse in the middle of a game. She found no evidence that he was suffering from pancreatitis.

The autopsy would undergo a series of expert analyses — one of which involved dozens of specialists and was headed by the country’s most famous cardiologist. That panel was confident enough to provide what appeared to be an endpoint to the investigation.

“The drawbacks in medical aid given to Magnitsky,” they wrote, “have no connection to his death.”

Still, the experts did not hide their dissatisfaction. After reviewing accounts from medical staff members, they said the testimony was so contradictory that they could not even determine the time or place of Mr. Magnitsky’s death, official documents show. They were given such paltry documentation that they “couldn’t give an objective assessment of medical care” or determine whether a crime occurred.

They noted that none of Mr. Magnitsky’s doctors had showed concern over his heart, and that diagnostic work done three weeks before his death showed no signs of heart disease.

Moreover, no blood samples were taken when Mr. Magnitsky arrived at the hospital — “the lab only works during the day, and it was night,” Dr. Gaus told a forensic expert — and little toxicology screening was done after his death. So it is difficult to know whether his symptoms were caused by septic shock, an overdose of some agent, or some other form of poisoning. And there was little explanation for the fact that he had been left in a cell for more than an hour in a state of acute distress.

By fall, police officials were so confident that they began to go on the attack. At a ceremony to observe Militia Day, the Interior Ministry bestowed public honors on the investigators who helped put Mr. Magnitsky in prison. On the anniversary of his death, the ministry held a news conference to announce an astounding new accusation: He himself was guilty, said a spokeswoman, of applying for a fraudulent $230 million tax refund. That is the crime Hermitage had reported to prosecutors in 2007.

The inquiry Mr. Medvedev had ordered was extended a second time, but now a new signal had gone out: No arrest was imminent.

“There is no basis to believe that his death was connected to the officials carrying out his prosecution,” Aleksandr Bastrykin, director of the Investigative Committee, the Russian agency that was charged with inquiring into his death, said in September.

No Longer Waiting

Mr. Borshchev had long since stopped waiting for a response to his report. He was at home listening to the radio one day when he heard Aleksei V. Anichin, the head of the Interior Ministry unit that handled Mr. Magnitsky’s case, say that his investigators were “the people who suffered the most from Mr. Magnitsky’s death” — because they lost the opportunity to convict him.

“After this statement,” he said, “it became clear that the investigation is not interested in finding the truth.”

Something had changed during the year, and the members of the Public Oversight Commission felt it as keenly as anyone. When the time came to nominate the new members of the panel — whose single high-profile act had been its damning report on Mr. Magnitsky’s death — the candidates were not well known in human rights circles.

Two were from the Association of Professional Security Guards; two were from the Veterans of the Secret Services; another two were from the Association of Retired Police Operatives; two were from the Association of Police Veterans. The balance on the panel is now so tenuous that Mr. Borshchev fears he will be replaced as the body’s president. One of his critics on the panel, Anton V. Tsvetkov of the Officers of Russia Foundation, complained about “nihilists who disavow everything, who criticize everything,” but said his position had nothing to do with the report on Mr. Magnitsky’s death. “I don’t think anyone read that report,” he said.

Two weeks ago, the state’s lead investigator for the first time asked to interview Mr. Borshchev and Ms. Volkova about their research in the case. They sat together for three hours, meticulously reviewing the findings, which are to be attached to the official file. As they left, Mr. Borshchev said, he clung to the hope that Mr. Medvedev might still press to uncover what really happened.

Ms. Volkova said she was exhausted from the effort of hoping. “I have begun to feel sorry for our president, for Medvedev,” she said. “I look at him and say: ‘Poor, poor boy. Are you really going to clean up all this dirt that they are producing? These hundreds of thousands of corrupt people?’ I am sure that he is the most pitiable person.”

“Nothing was stopping him from giving an order, at least, not to give awards to the investigators,” she said. “Nothing stopped him.”

Copyright 2010 The New York Times

The UCIMC has no paid news staff.  The stories that are reported here are reported because community members choose to report them.  Anyone can post to the website, broadcast on the radio station, or utilize IMC media eqipment.  Unlike conventional newspapers, IMC work is done by community volunteers.  If you feel strongly about events taking place in our comunity, make use of these resources.  A few volunteers cannot cover every event in the UC area.

Rietz has recused herself on a previous occasion because of her boyfreind in blue.

This time, how about if we ask for his name?

- ROKNICH,

Galesburg, Illinois

You guys just said earlier that you aren't professional media and don't employ journalists.

Just because I like playing GI Joe doesn't mean I can sit in on Pentagon meetings.

Besides, all you've done is trash her - why would she want to talk to you?

Why won't the State's Attorney let Brian Dolinar speak with her?

Rioting only hurts people who aren't involved.

Do you think rioting in a civilized society makes your point made?

Do you think the police and citizens are going to sit back and go, "Hey.. those guys are right!" ?

Rioting is a violation of both law and morality.  You have the right to peaceably assemble and express yourself.  You do not have a right to endanger the public.

Any opinions that you might have swung your way.. any minds you might have enlightened.. any progress you might have created to effect change and demonstrate problems with CPD will immediately be marginalized.

Take the high road.

While I will certainly agree that protest works, the rest of your suggestions aren't very useful.

There is no need for permits to protest in our communit, so why make a big deal about "unpermitted protest"?

I don't think rioting is useful either. CPD has shown themselves to be more than willing to react and overreact with violence -- and apparently even be rather clumsy about it. That appears to be why one young man is dead, at the very least. There's no point in serving up more victims to them.

My assessment of your post is that you're an agent provacateur meant to discredit CUCPJ and others in our community working peacefully to bring about much needed change.

Or you're just plain stupid.

Please refrain from spewing further crap like that.

Then who should review the facts if not outside police agencies? Racist individuals with their own agenda-- I.E. Citizens for Peace and Justice and UCIMC?!. These groups are doing nothing to help this situation or to bring this community together, and none of you did anything to help this child when he was alive nor are you helping numerous other delinquent children by filling their minds with hate and ignorance. Taking them out of school to listen to your trash rather than keeping them in school where they can earn their education and become productive citizens. You’re using his death as a stepping stone to scream out your own prejudices. You cause more hate in this community then you do good. You spout lies and call it the truth. The report is clear: The only ones to change their statements were those harboring a runaway in an effort to conform to what you want them to say—statements to better support you “white-hating” cause. You’re groups are less than credible and you should be denied any further public access to spew your hatred.

I absolutely agree with you that a modern firearm cannot fire without human action.

 - All guns are always loaded

 - Never let the muzzle cross anything you are not prepared to kill

 - Know your target and what's beyond it

 - Never place your finger on the trigger unless you have decided to kill the target

 - Maintain control of your weapon at all times.

The five rules of gun ownership.  If any one of them had been followed the death would not have occured. 

While the intent was accidental the discharge was caused by human action.

I'm assuming you are the anonymous poster I responded to earlier. As I pointed out earlier you are welcome to attend meetings and speak your mind regarding what is going on in the community. If you have nothing better to do with your time than to engage in accusations and finger pointing of your own that is too bad.

I can't speak for other members of CUCPJ, but I really don't see myself as a progressive in many respects. In some respects I'm actually fairly conservative and in other respects liberal. Plus I'm not so naive as to think we can live in a colorblind society at this point. In fact the colorblind stance is one that can perpetuate racism in ways that drive the current situation underground.

I could choose to remain anonymous, but what purpose would that really serve?

Uh.................................

Where is your concern for Officer John Kim who was being choked to death by Gregory Brown.  Remember he was choked until he was unconcious.  Or is the aggravated battery of a police officer not a concern to you?  They tried everything short of a round to his head  ( which I believe Mr. Brown deserved that night) to get him off of Officer Kim.   It sickens me that your more concerned over some POS than you are a Police Officer.

You are so full of shit....you wouldn't be able to tell the truth in this or any other forum if one of the other idiots in this bullshit blog actually typed it up and gave it to you to read.

You seem to be so absorbed into your left-wing liberal bullshit, that you are actually beginning to believe yourself and the lies that you are throwing out to every person that will listen to you because they are ignorant and poorly educated enough that you actually sound intelligent to them.

I think you're just trolling here. But maybe you have a point, even if I think your motivation is just pulling our leg.

This is Illinois and we all know how generally corrupt government is in this state. Why should the legal/justice/law enforecement system be an exception to this all too well known rule about the good ol boy government we endure as citizens?

So yeah, why limit the house-cleaning to one sector of government? Throw all those bums out and don't stop until we get a whole new government in place. Give those who qualify -- and aren't disqualified because by actual conviction for corruption -- their pensions and send them home.

Frankly, a new group could do no worse than those in place right now.

I think it's clear that whatever happened that day, Norbits' pulled the trigger. But from reading what is available, things happened so fast, it's clear that Norbits did not intend to kill Kiwane. Reckless, probably. Accidental, maybe. Intentionally, no.

It would make a stronger argument that things need to change at CPD to avoid statements that somehow imply that Norbits intended to kill Kiwane. I don't think he did.

Also, while I consider the report issued by the state's attorney to be self-serving, politically influenced, and driven by slective use of the available evidence, her actions can't be considered as the topic of an FBI investigation. Certainly, it should be a major issue in the next campaign season, if she should decide to run again for her current office, but that's a political issue. I really don't think we need the FBI involved in politics, as that's a bad, bad, bad idea, given the past record of involving the FBI in politics.

I wonder if they are in the other thread under "Critique of SA report..."?

This is actually a web site.

We don't practice censorship. Like any publication, we have certain editing standards. Unlike most publications, we use open publishing. You write it, hit send, and it gets published. We'd appreciate it if you act reasonably civil, but we understand that, especially in the current situation where a young man tragically lost his life, people will hold differing opinions.

The posts which you reference are still here. They were taken down because they seemed to be intended to continue propagating an inflammatory lie that CUCPJ had called for rioting. This is pernicious nonsense. There was already one such post, along with several rebuttal posts indicating that others felt it was, at best, unhelpful and untrue and, perhaps, had even been posted by someone intending to paint CUCPJ in a false light. That was enough.

So when there were two more such posts here yesterday afternoon, those posts were hidden. If you think they are important to read, then register as a user and look for hidden posts and you can read them. They will not be visible here and future such posts will also be hidden. They may have other content that is acceptable, but the "riot" stuff was over the top. They are inappropriate, as is some of the other content that people seem to have felt they needed to post as commentary and has been hidden for various reasons. By being hidden, it tends to reflect more on those posting it and, by leaving it hidden, we intend that it continue to reflect on them and not on the IMC.

One last thing, it is a general rule on the internet that editing decisions be discussed elsewhere than in the forum, so raising such topics here is considered off-topic. If you want to discuss, you can send an email to: imc-web@ucimc.org

I have no idea if Terry is a member of CUCPJ.

The IMC provides media and facilities for the community to use. CUCPJ uses them, as do a number of other groups This is the IMC mission statement:
The Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center is a grassroots organization committed to using media production and distribution as tools for promoting social and economic justice in the Champaign County area. We foster the creation and distribution of media, art, and narratives emphasizing underrepresented voices and perspectives and promote empowerment and expression through media and arts education.

The removal had nothing to do with the crticisms of CUCPJ. It had everything to do with saying that people were calling for rioting. I do not believe that anyone called for rioting in CUCPJ.

If you want to investigate further and come up with some evidence of that, then go ahead. I believe there is video here on the website. Take a look and document it and come up with the facts. I know a few of the CUCPJ members and it seems totally out of chaarcter to me, as well as something that I'm sure I would have heard about already if it had in fact taken place. I might be wrong.  Under the circumstances, I felt that it was and is unsubstantiated that CUCPJ called for rioting and, that given the direction the discussion was heading, that it was inappropriate for it to remain visible.

Now, let's otherwise return to the discussion. Thanks.