PRESS CONFERENCE AFTER THE FIRST DAY OF THE TRIAL

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

PRESS CONFERENCE AFTER THE FIRST DAY OF THE TRIAL

4:00pm, on the steps of Bronx Supreme Court. Press release follows.

The Justice Committee, P.O. Box 1885, New York, New York 10159

Contacts: Gina Arias (Justice Committee): 646-321-5425

Kathie Cheng (October 22 Coalition): 917-414-4612

Esther Wang (Peoples' Justice): 512-769-1585

BRONX MOTHER OF POLICE SHOOTING VICTIM CALLS FOR HIGHER POLICE ACCOUNTABILITY. BRONX SUPREME COURT JURY TO DECIDE CIVIL CASE

May 23rd, 2007 – Seven years after the death of her 23-year-oldson, Malcolm Ferguson, Juanita Young says too many questions remain unanswered. On Tuesday, May 29th at 4:30PM, The Justice Committee, Peoples' Justice and The October 22nd Coalition will join Ms. Young and attorney Seth Harris on the steps of Bronx Supreme Court (851 Grand Concourse, off of 161st St) in a press conference calling for stepped-up police accountability.

"When they killed Malcolm, they killed five people that month,” Young told journalists after the 2000 shooting, referring to the four other young black men who were killed by NYPD in the month following the verdict that exonerated the police who killed Amadou Diallo. "When they kill your child, there's a kind of pain you can never get relief from. You take that with you to the day you die.”

To deal with that pain, Juanita Young joined with other parents and organizations fighting police brutality. Still seeking justice in her son's case, Young says she understands that the culture and practices of community policing must change – an approach long held by The Justice Committee, which led the fight against the controversial 48-hour rule (allowing police officers to wait two full business days before having to have to answer questions from the Police Department about possible misconduct).

"We have to question how police are trained and what their mandate is," says Justice Committee Co-Coordinator Gina Arias. "It seems the more technology they get the more deaths we get in communities of color ... if anything, their position should demand a higher standard of accountability than ordinary citizens. They are supposed to serve the interests of the community – not cause suffering and death with impunity."

Malcolm Ferguson was killed on March 1, 2000, when plainclothes officer Louis Rivera – assigned to an Area Impact Team (AIT) – chased the unarmed man up the stairs of a Bronx building. Police say a struggle ensued, ending in the accidental discharge of Rivera's16-shot, 9mm Smith & Wesson automatic. The 23-year old died at the scene from a "single contact gunshot wound of the head with perforations of skull and brain." An examination of Rivera's firearm revealed "blood and/or tissue residue on the barrel of the weapon."

Ironically, this incident occurred only three blocks from the police killing of unarmed African immigrant, Amadou Diallo and five days after Ferguson had been singled out and detained during a community protest of the Diallo verdict exonerating all cops involved in that shooting. And, while the official police version of Ferguson's shooting claims the young man was a drug dealer, others say Malcolm ran because he was scared of the police. Juanita Young says her son had "had problems," but was "moving forward with his life." He was one month shy of completing parole for a drug-selling conviction and was filing a 5 million dollar brutality suit against the city charging police broke his hand during the 1999 arrest. "What they say about him is a barefaced lie, they abused him,” Young said, "and then they killed him."

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