Hasta La Gadget!

WASHINGTON — Four separate employees of the Drug Enforcement Administration saw or heard a college student who was left handcuffed in a holding cell without food or water for five days after he was supposed to be released, according to a newly released summary of an internal Department of Justice investigation. The employees told the DOJ Inspector General’s Office that there was “nothing unusual” about their encounters with Daniel Chong — even as he screamed, kicked the door, drank his own urine and tried to carve “sorry mom” into his arm with shards of glass.

Chong, a 23-year-old University of California, San Diego student at the time of the April 2012 incident, reached a $4.1 million settlement with the federal government in 2013.

He was supposed to be released the same day he was detained when his friend’s house was raided. The DEA said it found Ecstasy, marijuana, hallucinogenic mushrooms and weapons in the home. But Chong was told that law enforcement did not plan to charge him and that he would be released as soon as the paperwork was completed. It didn’t work out that way.

When someone finally paid attention to Chong, he was incoherent and had to be taken to the hospital, according to the Associated Press.

Though the full version of the inspector general’s report has not been released, a spokesman with the office said the summary was made public “in the interest of enhancing transparency in administrative matters, consistent with privacy considerations.” The summary states that the failure of three agents assigned to the drug bust — one DEA employee and two DEA task force officers — to ensure that Chong was released from custody after deciding he would not be charged “resulted in Chong’s unjustified incarceration from April 21 to April 25, and his need for significant medical treatment.”

The investigation found that a separate DEA supervisor was to blame for the incident as well. According to the summary, the supervisor “showed poor judgment” when he launched an inquiry into the matter without approval — even assigning the two task force officers who had forgotten about Chong in the first place to process the holding cell for evidence.

Additionally, DEA management in the field and at headquarters “improperly initiated a review of the incident” before they notified the Inspector General’s Office, a violation of DOJ and DEA policy that “could have caused harm to a potential criminal prosecution.”

Nonetheless, the inspector general’s investigation found the decision to decline prosecution in this case reasonable in view of all the facts and circumstances. It is not known what, if any, disciplinary action was taken against the unnamed officers and DEA officials.

Julia Yoo, a lawyer who represented Chong in his settlement with the agency, said the summary “highlights the unacceptable and appalling failings of DEA, both systemic and individual.”

“We are gratified by the thorough and impartial investigation by the OIG [Office of the Inspector General] and pleased that what happened to Daniel will serve as an impetus for critical institutional changes,” Yoo told The Huffington Post. “I would urge the OIG to release the entire investigation report for the sake of transparency.”

In a statement, a spokeswoman with the DEA’s San Diego division said the agency had adopted new policies to try to stop this from happening again.

“The Drug Enforcement Administration remains deeply troubled by the unfortunate incident surrounding Daniel Chong’s detention at DEA’s San Diego Division in April 2012,” Amy Roderick said. “Immediately following the incident, DEA implemented a new agency wide policy for processing arrestees and detainees. These procedures closely mirror the OIG’s recent recommendations, and include routinely inspecting holding cells, assigning an agent or task force officer to the holding area, and maintaining an occupancy ledger for holding cells. The DEA is confident that these measures will help to prevent similar incidents in the future.”

WASHINGTON — Gay rights groups are jumping ship on legislation they previously hailed as one of their biggest priorities of the year: the Employment Non-Discrimination Act.

The American Civil Liberties Union, Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, Lambda Legal, the National Center for Lesbian Rights and the Transgender Law Center announced in a joint statement on Tuesday that they are withdrawing support for the Senate ENDA bill because of its sweeping religious exemption.

The exemption “allows religious organizations to discriminate based on sexual orientation and gender identity,” reads the group statement, calling the matter something that “has long been a source of significant concern to us.”

Civil rights groups have long trumpeted their support for ENDA, which would make it illegal to fire or harass someone at work based on their sexual orientation or gender identity. But some have privately had concerns with an exemption in the bill that would allow businesses with religious affiliations to fire someone for being lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. That language goes far beyond religious exemptions afforded under The Civil Rights Act of 1964 for characteristics like race, gender, religion or national origin.

The groups say last week’s Supreme Court decision in the Hobby Lobby case was a factor in flipping positions on ENDA. The court ruled that a religious employer could not be required to provide employees with certain types of contraception. Some faith leaders have since invoked the ruling in calling on President Barack Obama to exempt them from a forthcoming executive order that would ban job discrimination against LGBT employees of federal contractors.

“Given the types of workplace discrimination we see increasingly against LGBT people, together with the calls for greater permission to discriminate on religious grounds that followed immediately upon the Supreme Court’s decision last week in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, it has become clear that the inclusion of this provision is no longer tenable,” reads the groups’ statement. “It would prevent ENDA from providing protections that LGBT people desperately need and would make very bad law with potential further negative effects. Therefore, we are announcing our withdrawal of support for the current version of ENDA.”

The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force announced it also is withdrawing support for ENDA.

“Frankly, it is becoming harder and harder for me, for us, to tolerate our own moral and political inconsistencies by protesting the Hobby Lobby decision, then advocating for the current ENDA with its broad religious exemption, and then insisting that the president not include a broad exemption in the upcoming executive order protecting LGBT people working for federal contractors,” wrote the group’s executive director, Rea Carey, in a Tuesday op-ed.

The shift is a huge blow for the legislation, which passed the Senate last year, but has stalled in the House. But there were signs of discontent before the Supreme Court’s ruling in Hobby Lobby. The National Center for Lesbian Rights and the Transgender Law Center, along with a few state LGBT groups, dropped support for the Senate version of ENDA early last month.

Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), sponsor of the Senate ENDA bill, demurred Tuesday when asked if it’s time to revisit the religious exemption in his legislation. He redirected attention to Obama’s forthcoming executive order on federal contractors. The order wouldn’t go as far as ENDA, but is still a top priority among civil rights groups.

“I think all the conversation right now is with the administration over how they forge their action regarding government contractors,” Merkley told The Huffington Post. “So I’ll be very interested in following that.”

Asked specifically about LGBT rights groups pulling their support from ENDA over its religious exemption, Merkley repeated that he’s focused on the anticipated executive order from the president. “That is a huge step forward if they’re going to act to end discrimination against all those millions of folks with contracts,” he said.

Some LGBT rights groups are sticking with the Senate ENDA bill, despite concerns with its religious exemption.

“HRC supports ENDA because for us it’s a question of providing those most in need with basic workplace nondiscrimination protections,” said Fred Saenz, vice president for communications and marketing at the Human Rights Campaign.

The National Center for Transgender Equality also appears to be standing by the bill, though its executive director, Mara Keisling, acknowledged the religious exemption is not good.

“The National Center for Transgender Equality has been a leader for years in advocating that the over-broad religious exemptions in the Employment Non-Discrimination Act was unacceptable and needs to be narrowed,” Keisling said. “Discrimination of any sort cannot and should not be used to hide discrimination against LGBT people — that is contrary to every American’s fundamental First Amendment rights.”

The movement away from the Senate ENDA bill fractures a coalition that has been pushing for a vote in the GOP-controlled House, where a more progressive version of the legislation is even less likely to pass than in the Senate. The broad religious exemption in the Senate version was put there in part to attract enough Republican support for passage.

There was a bipartisan coalition formed in January, Americans for Workplace Opportunity, with the specific mission of pressuring the House to vote on the Senate’s version of ENDA. One of its members, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, is among the groups pulling its support for the bill.

When asked if the group will stay with Americans for Workplace Opportunity, Carey said, “We are part of a number of coalitions with the one you mentioned, with the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, and also in partnership with other organizations that aren’t LGBT-specific organizations. And we will continue to work with all of them to push forward on fair legislation for our community.”

Some of ENDA’s backers are looking at the bigger picture and see little reason to get upset about the religious exemption.

One prominent LGBT rights advocate, who requested anonymity in order to speak freely, said there’s “no doubt” that the current exemption is a problem. But the political reality is that ENDA isn’t likely to go anywhere in this Congress, which means the bill will die at the end of the year and its supporters can bring it up again next year — with new language.

“People will hunker down, ride out this Congress and you’ll never see this religious exemption again,” said this advocate.

SAN DIEGO (AP) — A government investigation has found that four U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration employees saw or heard a handcuffed college student while he was held in a San Diego cell for five days without food or water.

The U.S. Justice Department’s inspector general’s office said Tuesday that the employees told investigators they assumed whoever placed Daniel Chong in the cell would soon return for him and that they found nothing unusual. Investigators faulted three case agents and a supervisor who were responsible for Chong’s safety and DEA management for failing to notify the inspector general’s office earlier. The DEA declined to say what consequences the employees faced, if any.

Chong was picked up in a drug sweep in April 2012.

After he was released, Chong was hospitalized for five days for dehydration, kidney failure, cramps and a perforated esophagus. Last year, Chong settled his lawsuit against the federal government for $4.1 million.

Let’s Go JULY —

Romance with Romeo and Juliet, great music at the Hollywood Bowl and the Santa Monica Pier, and a fascinating lecture about what we can learn from animals.

There’s always more online at The Family Savvy. Visit us for more!

A new report may shed light on why blacks and Latinos are often punished more severely than whites for the same crimes.

The study, released on Tuesday by the Vera Institute for Justice, shows that prosecutors in the office of Manhattan’s district attorney have cracked down harder on blacks and Latinos in some respects than on whites, raising the question of whether their decision-making process is tainted by racial prejudice.

Plenty of ink has been spilled on the fraught relationships between minorities and police departments around the country. But Vera’s researchers say that no other study of racial bias has looked as closely or comprehensively at the inner workings of a prosecutor’s office. Cyrus R. Vance Jr., Manhattan’s district attorney, provided the independent research group with access to the records of more than 200,000 cases from 2010 and 2011. Although the findings don’t show Vance’s office in a particularly flattering light, the authors went out of their way to commend the DA for cooperating.

“The most interesting thing about this study is the fact that it was done,” said Nicholas Turner, director of the Vera Institute. “There have been great concerns about racial disparity in the criminal justice system, but the role of the prosecution has very much remained a black box. So the fact that Cy Vance was able to say that this is an issue that is important to him to understand, and to look under the hood and bring us in to do it, I think is very much the most important and signal contribution of this report.”

The researchers identified factors other than race that seemed to influence how Manhattan prosecutors treated defendants, including whether a defendant had a public or private attorney, and whether he or she had been arrested before. Still, race played a role. For example, blacks and Latinos who had the opportunity to plead guilty in exchange for a reduced sentence were more likely than whites to receive plea bargains that would have required them to spend some time behind bars, according to the report.

This discrepancy was especially pronounced when it came to drugs. An analysis of all the misdemeanor drug offenses examined by the study found that black defendants were 27 percent more likely than whites to receive jail or prison time as part of a plea deal. For Latinos, the gap was 18 percent.

The report also showed that blacks were 10 percent and Latinos 3 percent more likely than whites to be held behind bars before trials. (The study controlled for factors besides race, including the defendant’s prior record and the seriousness of the charge.)

The prosecutors did seem to treat blacks and Latinos more leniently than whites in one respect, though there may be more to this than meets the eye. Black and Latino defendants were more likely than whites to have their cases dismissed before they went to trial, but this may be because the police were more likely to bring them in on bogus or unsubstantiated charges. (In general, Asians received less punitive treatment than whites at most stages of the process.)

The report makes no attempt to explain the disparities it uncovered, and offers no recommendations to the prosecutor’s office.

“Vance has shown leadership on looking at this issues, and I have confidence that he is going to show leadership on looking at what the right corrective measures are,” said Turner.

A spokeswoman for the DA’s office said Vance was unavailable for comment on Tuesday afternoon. In a press release, Vance said his office was proud of the undertaking and “committed to implementing preventative strategies to reduce any unintended racial and ethnic disparities that exist.”