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Personal Service Quality Insurance ALICE ANDERSON AGENCY INSURANCE & REAL ESTATE 808A E. 46th, Austin, Texas 465-6577 A-PLUS UNIVERSITY SERVICES With you in mind: typing theses resumes law briefs multilithing dissertations graphic arts dept. Our prices are reasonableour service is good. Come by 504 West 24th St. \(in the same 477-5651. Happiness Is Printing By li p 1;TURA PRESS ANC F11/ Phone 512/442-7836 1714 SOUTH CONGRESS P.O. BOX 3485 AUSTIN, TEXAS Newspapers Magazines Political Specialists Signs and Placards Bumperstrips Office Supplies 100% Union Shop the strike. San Antonio Attorney Matt Garcia, however, had several examples of incidents which occurred in small towns in south Texas and which were not related to the unionization movement: A man went to the courthouse to inquire as to his father’s case. He was told that he was going to be tried at 7. So he went to find out whether the man was to be tried at 7 a.m. or 7 p.m. And this inquiry was made of the justice of the peace. When this inquiry was made, the sheriff walked in and said: “What do you want, Mexican?” Of course they don’t call you “Mexican” … they call you “Meskin,” and the man said: “Well, this is none of your concern,” and they proceeded to pistol-whip him. Both the sheriff and the judge. The man had a very severe gash across his scalp. He was beaten about the face, and he was dragged from the court … And he kept yelling that he was going to die, that he was bleeding to death. 10 The Texas Observer IN DALLAS COUNTY Two for the People for a Change BERLAIND BRASHEAR Pl. 3 BILL STEHR Place 12 for State Representative Democratic Runoff, Sat., June 6 No criminal charges were ever brought against the victim or against those who beat him up. This and other examples, the commission reported, were illustrative of widespread patterns throughout the Southwest. Mexican Americans, to a far greater degree than Anglos, were frequently the victims of “excessive force on the part of police, the unequal treatment of juveniles, a lack of courtesy in dealing with Mexican Americans, inequalities in the treatment of traffic violators, frequency of arrests for `investigation’ and ‘stop and frisk’ practices in Mexican American neighborhoods, and inadequate police protection in thbse neighborhood in comparison to other neighborhoods.” Even more serious, in the long run, than the frequent violations of individual rights are the often successful attempts on the part of “law enforcement” agencies to interfere with or halt efforts to organize the poor. A June 3, 1967 rally of Reies Tijerina’s Alianza was harassed by police and the local D.A., who went on the air to announce the assembly was illegal because “the participants were planning to take property by force,” and to threaten attendants with six-month sentences. Notices reading “TAKING PROPERTY OF ANOTHER BY FORCE IS THE COMMUNIST WAY, YOU ARE BEING MISLEAD [sic] PLEASE RETURN HOME” were handed out by cops who stopped cars en route to the rally. Those who attended a June 5 barbecue at Canjilon were held outdoors by National Guardsmen and police for 24 hours. The State Attorney General’s office later said only the John Birch Society’s `!American Opinion reported the incident fairly. Parallels between that kind of action and what took place in El Paso, when about 50 Mexican American slum dwellers were harassed and insulted as they prayed in a park across the street from their landlord’s house, in a peaceful demonstration organized by a group called MACHOS, are obvious. SUPPOSEDLY, THE system provides remedies for citizens who feel they have been denied their rights. “Going back where they came from,” though often suggested in these parts, is hardly a solution for the Spanish-surnamed, since, as the report notes, 85% of them are native born, and half of them are the children of native-born parents. Dismally, the commission concluded that local and federal remedies for police malpractice are woefully inadequate. In most cases the only authority to whom a complaint about a police officer can be made is to the department itself, and police officials are reluctant to take action against their own officers. Dr. Robert Hausman, former Bexar County meidcal examiner, testified that 19 people were killed by San Antonio police between 1956 and 1968. At least ten cases went to the grand jury, but of those, only in three cases were indictments returned, and only one resulted in conviction of the policeman. In Hausman’s opinion, more indictments were not obtained because the district attorney was, in most of the cases, not anxious to obtain them. In general, few prosecutions, either criminal or civil, have been successful . when they involve Mexican Americans objecting to mistreatment by law enforcement agencies. The commission also criticized the jury selection process, and said that both grand and petit juries in the Southwest tended to exclude Mexican Americans. Corpus Christi attorney James DeAnda testified that, until recently, prosecutors in Nueces County automatically struck the names of Mexican Americans from jury lists in cases where a chicano was the defendant. The report said that although at least 320,000 Mexican Americans in Texas met the current requirements for jury service, the incidence of their selection was far, far below that which chance would have produced. Mike Gonsalez said he had tried numerous cases in Uvalde, Maverick, Zavala, Dimmitt, Real, Val Verde, and Kinney counties, and could not recall the presence of a Mexican American on a single jury. Matt Garcia remembered one in his trials, and that was in a federal court in Del Rio. In all five southwestern states, both grand and petit juries are selected by various elected and appointed officials. That Mexican Americans rarely appear is to be expected, considering the comment of Judge John R. Brown of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit: “The Texas system … for constituting the grand jury is highly selective, and relying at no stage on random choice or the laws of chance, it commits much to the jury commissioners.” SUPREME COURT Justice Hugo L. Black is also quoted in the commission report: The Texas statutory scheme is not in itself unfair; it is capable of being carried out with no racial discrimination whatsoever. But by reason of the wide discretion permissible in the various steps of the plan, it is equally capable of being applied in such a manner as practically to proscribe any group thought by the law’s administrators to be undesirable. In most cases, jury commissioners select from their own ethnic, economic, and social background, the commission reported, and sometimes from their own “tennis clubs.” The federal Department of Justice, which, one would hope, would be an avenue for investigation and prosecution of unfair police tactics, also takes its share of criticism from the report. “I do not conceive it to be a function of the Department of Justice,” John Mitchell is quoted as saying, to be a policeman of policemen. . .” Testimony showed that he wasn’t kidding. Mrs. Margarita Contreras and Mrs. Frances Alvarez of Pecos reported that as