Voice of Witness

Right now, Voice of Witness needs your help to make possible a groundbreaking new collection of oral histories from the innocent men and women who have been subject to hate crimes, discrimination, profiling and other injustices after 9/11.

Our forthcoming book documenting post-9/11 injustice seeks to tell the life stories of the innocent men and women who have been needlessly swept up in the ‘war on terror.’ Our narrators include people like the young Sikh man brutally assaulted simply for wearing a turban; the hard-working academic, subjected to suspicion and placed on FBI …

by John Knight

On Sunday, the Columbia Missourian ran a story about Ted White Jr., a man wrongfully convicted of assaulting his 12-year-old stepdaughter in 1999. White was exonerated in 2005 after his attorneys discovered that Detective Richard McKinley, the officer responsible for leading the investigation against White, was having an affair with White’s wife, a fact that was never disclosed in the conviction.

The Missourian reported that in 2008, White was awarded $16 million as compensation by Lee’s Summit, the Illinois city where he was convicted. But four years later, White is still waiting to receive the promised money. According to the city’s mayor, paying White would violate McKinley’s constitutional rights as a city employee, a claim one of White’s attorneys calls “rubbish.”

White told AP reporters, “They’re saying ‘We don’t care about you, your family, the money you spent to defend …

by Henry Jones

Last week, police officers in Los Angeles county rescued thirty-five illegal immigrants who were being held for ransom by their smugglers. The Los Angeles Times reports:

An Ecuadoran man told investigators he was held in an 800-square-foot Baldwin Park house while his captors demanded $2,500 above the $10,500 he had already paid to be smuggled into the United States.

Another man traveled from New York to pay $12,000 for the release of his 12-year-old son sequestered in the house. Smugglers then kidnapped the man and demanded another $1,000 from his family for his release.

The immigrants, most of whom came from Central America, had been detained in the house for about a week before “one of them managed to get a cellphone and call 911.”

The case …

By John Knight

On August 14, the BBC reported that two UNAMID police officers were abducted by gunmen in Darfur. It is the most recent incident in what the article calls “a wave of kidnappings involving foreign aid workers” in Sudan. Most kidnappings appear to be for money but the motives behind this weekend’s abductions remain unclear.

Nonetheless, the incident highlights the tensions surrounding UNAMID, one of the largest aid organizations in Darfur. In July, UNAMID took into its protection six members of the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA), who are wanted by the Sudanese government for their involvement in violent clashes between the SLA and the Liberty Justice Movement (LJM) in the Kamal refugee camp. The camp is one of the largest in Darfur, where many members of both the LJM and the SLA reside. Violence broke out between the …

Posted by Henry Jones.

This week the New York Times wrote about the Obama administration’s immigration enforcement approach of going hard after immigrant criminals while sparing undocumented students from deportation.

By remaining in the country, many of these students could become legal residents should Congress pass the Dream Act, a piece of legislation that would offer a path to citizenship for foreign-born individuals who have grown up in the US and who attend college or enlist in the military.

You can read the full article here.

Such a law would benefit Mexican-born students like Lorena, whose story is recounted in Underground America: Narrative of Undocumented Lives. Lorena came with her mother to the US illegally when she was six years old. She grew up in …

Today, Voice of Witness editor Ayelet Waldman blogged about her experience working on our forthcoming book Inside This Place, Not of It: Narratives from Women’s Prisons for The Atlantic. Her post gives readers an inside look at some of the issues facing women prisoners as well as those of Voice of Witness interviewers going into the field. To read the full article, click here.

Voice of Witness is still raising money to complete this important book- to make a donation, please click here. You can support Inside This Place, Not of It by clicking the ‘Donate’ button or support Voice of Witness throughout the year by becoming a monthly sustainer!