December 2003    

We print below a report on the seventh day of the trial of  Hostos Community College student leader, Miguel Malo, which continued on Tuesday, December 9.

There were dramatic developments in Bronx Criminal Court today in the trial of Hostos Community College student leader Miguel Malo. As the defense cross-examined prosecution witnesses over the last several days, big contradictions in the cops’ stories came out. And on Tuesday, three student witnesses who saw the arrest of Miguel on 15 August 2001 blew apart the cops’ story.

Before the start of the court session, City University (CUNY) faculty members held a press conference, called by City College professor Bill Crain, to declare their support for Miguel Malo and to denounce the police-state conditions that the CUNY administration has imposed on Hostos. Tuesday was faculty and staff support day at the trial, and about a dozen faculty members attended the session.

Professors and students from Hostos told a New York Times reporter about conditions in the college, where “peace officers” parade around in bullet-proof vests all day, access is strictly controlled, and members of the community are subjected to weapons searches just to attend an event at the community college. The Times reported:

“Pedro Rivera, 25, was one of the students arrested with Mr. Malo. After Mr. Malo was taken into custody, Mr. Rivera said, he quickly made a sign of his own that read, ‘Stop Arresting Our Students.’ ‘I stood up with the sign and then I was arrested,’ Mr. Rivera said.

“About a dozen professors from Hostos and its umbrella institution, the City University of New York, were in the Bronx Criminal Court building yesterday to support Mr. Malo. Gerald Meyer, a professor of history at Hostos, said that he was prevented last spring from handing out leaflets on college property during a teach-in against the war in Iraq.”

–“Backers See Free-Speech Issue in Hostos College Student's Trial,” New York Times, 10 December 2003

On Monday, the judge dismissed the charge against Malo of resisting arrest. Under questioning by defense attorney Ron McGuire, the campus security personnel admitted that neither they nor anyone else informed Miguel that he was under arrest until after the incident was over. Nor was he warned that he would be arrested, although campus security chief Bernabe tried to claim he was. On Tuesday, the assistant district attorney reprimanded the judge, scolding him for making a big mistake and demanding he reinstate the charges. The judge meekly responded to the tongue-lashing, saying that his “choice of words may not have been as precise as could be,” and said he would review his ruling. So much for the vaunted “independence” of the courts.

The judge’s rulings made it almost impossible for three Hostos faculty members to provide testimony about Miguel’s reputation, or that the cops’ claim that a leaflet announcing the ban on demonstrations inside the campus was a fiction. It was never distributed or posted that day.  Professor Henry Lesnick, who has taught at CUNY for 35 years, 21 of them at Hostos, was denied certification by the judge as an expert in English as a second language (ESL) even though he teaches the subject in the Department of Language Cognition. He was also prevented from testifying about regulations concerning student clubs. Even though he was an advisor to the student government, he was never notified about the ban on protests until April 2003, a year and a half after the arrests.

Professor Gerald Meyer authenticated photos taken on 16 August 2001 of Miguel Malo’s immediately after he was released after being held 24 hours for arraignment. Meyer said it reminded him of “something you see in church, like Jesus’ body. The entire back, from the neck to the waist, was covered by welts.” The prosecution disingenuously argued that he could not testify as to how Miguel got those injuries, since he was not in jail with the defendant the whole time, that perhaps they were self-inflicted. Yet the entire time between his arrest and when the photos were taken Malo was under the control of the state.

But the most spectacular testimony was that of the three students who witnessed the arrest of Miguel Malo. Aneudis Pérez was the president of the Hostos Student Senate. (At that time, Miguel was vice president of the Student Senate, as well as a member of the college senate’s committee on education.) He saw the whole arrest of Malo. Instead of only two campus “peace officers,” as the prosecution claimed, Perez reported that there were eight or nine. They surrounded Miguel and dragged him to a wall, as well as surrounding Pérez and other student leaders, threatening to arrest them also. One of the cops put his knee in Malo’s back while they handcuffed him.

The prosecution has been peddling the tale of Miguel voluntarily throwing himself on the floor, face down, then flipping over onto his back, twice, then getting up, then trying to run to a wall and pin himself against it, then again voluntarily sliding to the floor, face down, while flailing his arms and kicking the “peace officers.” Pérez said, on the contrary, that the cops threw Miguel onto the floor, twisted his arms behind his back and handcuffed. Thus he couldn’t have hit anyone with a loose cuff, which is one of the assault charges. Then the cops picked up Malo by his arms so his feet were off the floor, an extremely painful condition, and carried him to the elevator.

A second student, John Suero, had been standing at Miguel’s side during the arrest. “Miguel Malo was thrown down on the floor, face down, as they put handcuffs on him.” He testified that Malo did not kick or hit anyone, and indeed couldn’t because his hands were behind his back and he was being held on the floor. A third student, Estela Santos, who only knew Malo by sight and who had been standing on the registration line, confirmed these facts. “The security was on his back. He was on the ground. They had their foot in him.” She also reported that there had been no disturbance on the registration line, and that Malo had not walked over to the line.

Tuesday’s testimony was explosive, but the whole trial on trumped-up charges is rigged against Miguel Malo, as it always is against the exploited and oppressed. The fundamental issue of free speech and the right to demonstrate has been repeatedly ruled out of order by the judge. The assistant D.A. constantly pops up and down objecting to the defense attorney’s questions, and the judge just as regularly sustains the objections, occasionally allowing a question or two for appearances’ sake. Far from being a “level playing field,” as the judge repeatedly intones, or merely biased, the judicial system is part of the mechanisms of capitalist rule and the repressive apparatus which is being beefed up during the present imperialist war on Iraq, Afghanistan and against working people around the world.

The whole trial is an object lesson in the class nature of the state. As Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin noted in his classic work, The State and Revolution, written at the height of the 1917 Russian Revolution, “According to Marx, the state is an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another; it is the creation of ‘order,’ which legalizes and perpetuates this oppression.”  Lenin quotes Engels, who notes that the state “consists not merely of armed men but also of material adjuncts, prisons, and institutions of coercion of all kinds,” such as the courts. In the Bolshevik handbook, The ABC of Communism (1920), N. Bukharin and E. Preobrazhensky write: “The administration of justice in the bourgeois State is a means of self-defence for the bourgeois class. Above all, it is employed to settle with those who infringe the rights of capitalist property or interfere with the capitalist system.” These revolutionary truths are being vividly demonstrated in the Bronx today.

Today, the capitalist rulers subjugate the mass of the working people and oppressed minorities through a massive repressive apparatus which holds them in its claws. One can see this vividly in the Bronx Criminal Court where hundreds of black and minority poor people and immigrants are run through a factory-like system every day, beginning with the elaborate security check. In the eyes of the authorities, Miguel Malo ’s second “crime” (in addition to protesting cuts at CUNY), was that he refused to buckle under to this system, pleading guilty in exchange for a reduced sentence, and instead courageously insisted on his rights. The Internationalist Group insists that this entire system of bourgeois injustice and the capitalist state of which it is a part must be swept away through workers revolution in order to provide justice and education for those who today are its victims.

Wednesday, December 10, will likely be the last day of trial proceedings. We urge supporters of Miguel Malo to attend the trial in Jury Room 7 of the Bronx Criminal Court, 215 East 161st Street in the Bronx, located one block east of Grand Concourse (take the 4 or D trains to the 161st Street stop).

URGENT: It takes money to effectively defend Miguel Malo. The state has unlimited resources. Miguel must rely on donations from his supporters. Right now, the defense is paying hundreds of dollars a day to obtain overnight transcripts of the court proceedings, which are vital to an effective cross-examination. Funds are urgently needed to pay for this. Please send as large a donation as you can to: Miguel Malo Legal Defense Fund, c/o Susan DiRaimo, 252 Fieldston Terrace, Bronx, NY  10471.

See also:

Defend Miguel Malo! (November 2003) 
Day One of Miguel Malo Trial  (1 December 2003) 
Day Two of Miguel Malo Trial  (2 December 2003) 
Day Three of Miguel Malo Trial  (3 December 2003) 
Day Four of Miguel Malo Trial  (4 December 2003) 
Day Five of Miguel Malo Trial  (5 December 2003) 
Day Six of Miguel Malo Trial  (8 December 2003)