Descendants Project sues to ensure health and safety of Black historic community 

On Tuesday, The Descendants Project, an organization founded to advocate for descendants of people once enslaved in Louisiana’s river parishes, asked a district court to declare a decades-old rezoning ordinance null and void and order St. John the Baptist Parish to remove it from all of its maps and records. 

Their suit stems from the 1990 corrupt rezoning of a large tract of rural land to industrial use in Wallace, La. In 1996, Lester Millet Jr., former council president of St. John the Baptist Parish, was sentenced to nearly five years in prison for his role in trying to aid Formosa, a Taiwanese corporation, build a rayon pulp factory next to Wallace. Millet engaged in money laundering and extortion and issued threats of expropriation to residents to coerce them into selling their land to Formosa. Millet abused his official position to push through the new zoning ordinance, but despite his conviction it remained on the books. 

“I remember my parents telling us that we were going to have to move,” said Jo Banner, a co-founder of The Descendants Project with her sister, Joy. “They were told there was nothing they could do and the parish was taking our land. We didn’t think we had a choice. This is a miscarriage of justice that is still causing us tremendous trauma, and it needs to be corrected. We need peace.”

To learn more, continue reading our press release on our website or visit our case page. Read up on this case in the Associated Press, NOLA.com and Courthouse News.

Charles Watts, Brooklyn man sentenced to 92 years in prison for robbery, asks court for compassionate release 

Charles Watts, a 51-year-old Black man from Brooklyn who received what amounts to a Death-By-Incarceration sentence for robberies in the early 1990s, filed a motion for compassionate release in federal court Tuesday. A first-time offender whose crimes caused no physical harm, he is taking this action under the First Step Act, the 2018 criminal justice reform law that gives the sentencing court authority to reduce a sentence when there are “extraordinary and compelling reasons” to do so. Watts was convicted under an application of a “stacking” law and sentenced to 92 years in prison. This law has since been amended, and the first-time offender would get about a 25-year sentence today. He has already spent nearly 30 years in prison.

“I am no longer the confused naive kid I was back in 1992,” says Mr. Watts. “I am now a strong minded grown man that chose to take a different path, the good path. I made a grave mistake early on in my life by hanging out and messing with the wrong group of people and letting peer-pressure guide me in the wrong direction which cost me 30-years in prison away from my family and loved ones." 

More information can be found on our website in our press release and on Charles Watts’s client profile page.

Screenings this month! Black and Missing & Boycott 

Center for Constitutional Rights Executive Director Vince Warren will be featured in two documentaries debuting this month. The first is four-part documentary series, Black and Missing, by multiple Emmy winner Geeta Gandbhir and award-winning documentarian, journalist, author, and activist Soledad O’Brien. The series follows sisters-in-law and Black and Missing Foundation founders Derrica and Natalie Wilson as they fight an uphill battle to bring awareness to the Black missing persons cases that are marginalized by law enforcement and national media. Black and Missing debuts on HBO Tuesday, November 23.

The second is Boycott, a documentary chronicling one of the most consequential First Amendment battles of the past few decades and investigating the question – how did we get here? Over the past six years, unbeknownst to most Americans, 33 states passed laws intending to silence boycott and other nonviolent measures aimed at pressuring Israel on its human rights record. These dangerous bills remove the legal protection that has been awarded to boycotts for generations, granting governments the power to condition jobs on political viewpoints. Boycott premiered Sunday at Doc NYC.