Acting as his own attorney, Philly man is acquitted of murder after nearly 13 years in prison

Hassan Bennett, right, pictured with his father in Philadelphia after being acquitted of second-degree murder. (Courtesy of Hassan Bennett)

By  Meagan FlynnReporterMay 9, 2019 at 4:13 a.m. PDT

Wearing a suit felt like a sham.

Hassan Bennett had been locked up for nearly 13 years — 4,614 days, he said — and so when he recently stood before the jury in a Philadelphia courtroom, he didn’t want to pretend he had been anywhere else. He dressed for court each day in his powder-blue prison uniform, with “DOC” written on the back in big bold letters, and throughout the 11-day trial, explained to jurors why they could not find him guilty of second-degree murder.

“They told me not to wear a prison uniform. I’m here in front of you in a prison uniform,” the 36-year-old told jurors during his closing argument, as he recounted to The Washington Post. “They told me not to let you see my prison arm band. I show you my prison armband. They told me not to stand in front of you representing myself.”ADVERTISING

And yet there he was — representing himself without the help of any attorneys, with a mandatory life sentence on the line. It was his fourth time on trial for the ambush shooting death of Devon English in 2006, and Bennett’s second time acting as his own lawyer. But on Monday, he made sure it would be the last.

Achieving an exceedingly rare feat, the pro se defendant with no law degree was acquitted of murder.

The jury deliberated for 81 minutes. For Bennett, it was 76 minutes too long.

“I was sitting in the holding cell thinking, after five minutes, what’s taking so long?” he said. “When the jury came in and they called me up, I already knew it was a not-guilty verdict.”

The brash confidence is a product of more than 12 years of preparation from a Pennsylvania prison, studying case law in the library by day and meticulously drafting legal briefs in his cell by night, using a flickering TV as a light source.

He told the story to The Post by phone on Wednesday evening while strolling with his goddaughter through a neighborhood park, periodically hanging up by accident because, he said, he is only just learning how to use a touch screen cellphone. “Sorry,” he said. “It’s my first time. I had to ask the kid what to do.”

His story starts on a September night in 2006, when police accused Bennett of masterminding a plot to kill 19-year-old English after losing $20 to him in a dice game; a second teenager, 18-year-old Corey Ford, was shot in the legs and the buttocks. Lamont Dade, 16, was also arrested in the shooting, to which he pleaded guilty in 2008 and was sentenced to 25 to 50 years in prison.

In their original statements to police, both Dade and Ford identified Bennett as the shooter — but later, at Bennett’s trial, they recanted, saying a homicide detective coerced them into making the statements.

Bennett maintained his innocence from the start. He told police he was on the phone with a friend at home when he heard the shots ring out, then ran to the scene to see what happened. But he said his original lawyer failed to introduce the phone records or call the witnesses that he believes would have supported his alibi, saving him years in prison.

His first trial in 2008 resulted in a mistrial, his second in conviction months later. As he petitioned for a third trial, his post-conviction appellate attorney lost appeal after appeal — until finally, in 2014, against the advice of every sane person in the legal system, Bennett told a judge he wanted to do it himself. He said he was tired of losing.

“They told me, if you mess up here, your tail is done,” he said. “Well, I’m not gonna mess up then. There is no room for error. This is the time you rely on yourself. They call it crunchtime in basketball, when the best player in the game gets the ball with five seconds left and it’s his last shot. He wins or loses on this shot. That’s how I felt.”

From then on, Bennett’s casual study of the legal system turned rigorous. To teach himself to write in legalese, he sought the help of his cellmate, nicknamed “Brother Mook” — a legal-savvy mentor who would rip up Bennett’s handwritten draft petitions into tiny shreds if he failed to write them in the proper format. “He was like my Yoda,” Bennett said.

Eventually, after reviewing every trial transcript and police record in his own case, he turned his attention to former Philadelphia homicide detective James Pitts, who interviewed Ford and Dade to obtain their witness statements against Bennett.

In recent years, Pitts has been accused of coercing witness statements in at least 10 cases, and in some murder cases, judges have vacated convictions because of Pitts’s misconduct, as the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. (Mired in scandal, he is on desk duty while the police department investigates, the Inquirer reported.) Bennett petitioned a court for a new trial on the basis that Pitts had used the same coercive tactics to obtain statements from Ford and Dade identifying him as the shooter.

A judge did not grant that request, but in 2017, Philadelphia Common Pleas Court Judge M. Teresa Sarmina vacated Bennett’s conviction and granted a new trial on the grounds of ineffective counsel. Bennett’s third trial last September, when he first represented himself, resulted in a hung jury — with all but one juror finding Bennett not guilty. ““If the defendant knew how close he was [to acquittal], he would have been crushed,” juror David Scott, a college professor, told the Inquirer afterward.

But Bennett said he was not crushed. By the time trial No. 4 rolled around, he was feeling more at ease than ever, as though a guilty verdict weren’t a possibility.

In his opening statement last month, he told the jury it was a case about using common sense — and asked jurors to remember a song from “Sesame Street.” He described himself as a suspect who didn’t fit the description, like Oscar the Grouch in a photo array of fruits. “One of these things just doesn’t belong here,” he sang.

“The Commonwealth will try to tell you that Oscar the Grouch belongs because Oscar the Grouch is always seen on the corner. He has a smart mouth. He’s nobody’s favorite on Sesame Street,” Bennett said. “But that doesn’t make him guilty when the evidence shows he’s not guilty.”

His case was that simple, he said. He submitted the phone records. He called the three witnesses he said corroborated his alibi. He cross-examined Ford and Dade, who again maintained Bennett was not at the scene.

And then he called Pitts.

He accused the former homicide detective of coercing statements from Ford and Dade — and questioned why, if Pitts were credible, prosecutors elected not to call him as a witness. Pitts denied the accusations. But the jury, Bennett told The Post, ultimately “saw through his hogwash.”

“Why didn’t the prosecutor call Detective Pitts?” he asked the jury, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported from the courtroom. “He’s the lead detective. He’s the head honcho. Pitts worked the witnesses for hours on end. We can’t tolerate this misconduct. We can’t tolerate these actions.”

Spokespeople for the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office didn’t respond to a request for comment late Wednesday, but told the Inquirer the office disagreed with the jury’s verdict. The victim’s family has long believed Bennett was guilty, saying that every new trial is “bringing back the pain of Devon’s death,” the Inquirer reported.

“I’m still trying to cope with it. I think it is wrong. I think the whole process is unfair,” Arturo Alleyne, English’s father, told the Inquirer of Monday’s acquittal. “All of this will be cleared up by God.”

Leaving the courthouse on Monday, Bennett said the first thing he did was go home and have a home-cooked meal with his family. He’s spent his time this week re-acclimating to life on the outside, asking his 10-year-old goddaughter to teach him how to use an Android, remembering to look for cars when crossing the street.

But by Friday, he said, he plans to get back to work. He said the court-appointed attorney who was required to be on “standby” throughout his trial — in case he decided he no longer wanted to represent himself — invited him to his office to discuss how Bennett could assist with briefs or investigations. He plans to study for the bar exam, he said, and to one day have clients of his own.

He said he already knew where he thought he might open his office.

“People from our neighborhood, from low-income neighborhoods, they don’t really know the law,” he said. “But see, there are people from the legal community that don’t know about the low-income neighborhoods. They don’t know about ‘the hood,’ as they call it.

“I am that bridge.”

Color of Change’s Rashad Robinson has had enough of corporate America’s empty platitudes

Robinson’s civil rights nonprofit is pushing companies to get on the right side of history—whether or not they’re ready.

Color of Change president Rashad Robinson mobilizes his nonprofit’s 7 million members for change. [Photo: Dee Dwyer]

BY WESLEY LOWERY LONG READADVERTISEMENTADVERTISEMENTADVERTISEMENT

Rashad Robinson was on a zoom call with his staff in June when he got the news.ADVERTISEMENT

The TV show Cops, a mainstay of American culture for 32 years, the foundation for decades of ride-along-with-the-police programming that deifies law enforcement, was going off the air. It was a major moment in television history, and one that, for many, seemed to have materialized out of thin air—a knee-jerk response to the racial politics of the moment. In reality, it was the culmination of a seven-year-long campaign by Robinson and Color of Change, the civil rights organization that he helms.

Color of Change had long viewed Cops as blatant public relations for law enforcement that reinforced racial stereotypes—and that was beamed directly into millions of living rooms each week. In 2013, in the wake of the shooting deaths of Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis, both unarmed Black teens, and outrage over police stop-and-frisk enforcement in New York City and elsewhere, the nonprofit launched a social media campaign calling on Fox, the show’s then distributor, not to renew it. Next came a petition, targeting Fox executives and advertisers. Then came the meetings with network execs. A protest outside of Fox’s L.A. studios was in the works when the network suddenly announced, in May 2013, that it would no longer air the show. But Cops had staying power, soon landing at Spike TV (now the Paramount Network). It would take another half decade of public and private pressure by Color of Change—along with the racial reckoning brought on this summer by the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd—to knock the show off the air in the United States. (Cops is still producing episodes for international markets.)

“Is it canceled canceled?” Robinson recalls asking. He had trouble, at first, believing the news. He had no time to celebrate beyond a quick smile, however. There were more battles to wage.

It should come as no surprise that Color of Change was one of the forces behind the Cops cancellation. What began 15 years ago as a scrappy digital upstart focused on marshaling an online response to stories of racial injustice is now one of the heavy hitters in American civil rights activism. The organization’s presence can be felt in nearly every racial civil rights battle currently taking place in America—from corporate boardrooms to television sets to prosecutors’ offices and judges’ chambers.

Color of Change has launched a political action committee, pouring money into the coffers of progressive prosecutors who vow to bring accountability for police killings and brutality. It’s behind a sustained campaign to change how Black and brown people are represented by Hollywood. And, increasingly, the organization is a player in the business world.

Over the past year, Color of Change has further solidified its role as both lead agitator and diversity adviser for corporate America. It led the recent campaign to demand that Facebook and other social media companies take aggressive action to rid their platforms of hate speech, pressuring hundreds of advertisers, including Coca-Cola, Unilever, and Verizon, to pull their money. Through the “Beyond the Statement” campaign, which launched in June, Color of Change is challenging corporate America to do more than offer empty platitudes in the wake of racial unrest. It has targeted fast-food companies, including McDonald’s and Burger King, along with retailers such as Nike, for talking about racial justice while not paying workers a living wage. And the group has gone after investment firms that release statements about equity but also give money to police unions and foundations.

“It’s a 21st-century approach to issues that date back to 1619,” says Chris Lehane, Air­bnb’s senior vice president for global policy and communications. He credits the organization for “holding us accountable” for racism on the platform in 2015. Since then, Airbnb has worked closely with Color of Change on issues of diversity within the company and on the platform.

Robinson, who has led Color of Change since 2011, sees his mission as creating a new infrastructure for civil rights activism, mobilizing online outrage into tangible force that “holds corporations accountable, that pushes for changes to how the media engages, that changes the narrative and the stories that we tell ourselves about change. And that tills the soil for long-term policy change.”

Vice president and chief of campaigns Arisha Hatch oversees Color of Change’s political work. [Photo: Dee Dwyer]

The nonprofit is structured almost like a newsroom or a political campaign, with different staff members clustered around areas of expertise and focus: criminal justice, technology, Hollywood, media representation. They identify opportunities to bend the structure of culture and society and apply what Arisha Hatch, the group’s vice president and chief of campaigns, calls an “inside-out approach”: pressuring decision makers by leveraging Color of Change’s massive reach to flood organizations with calls, emails, and the specter of boycotts.

The organization’s email list ballooned from 1.7 million members in the spring to more than 7 million members in October, and its text-message list grew from around 100,000 people to nearly 6 million. And that digital infrastructure, combined with financial independence—unlike many civil rights groups, Color of Change does not accept corporate donations—has allowed the organization to be seemingly everywhere.

If you’re a newly woke company, wondering how best to devote money and resources to fight racism, the group is likely your first call. And if you’re a corporation or organization besieged by racial controversy, Color of Change is likely leading the digital picket line.

---

Color of Change was born out of the federal government’s disastrous mishandling of Hurricane Katrina, in 2005. James Rucker, a Black computer scientist working with MoveOn.org, had been interested in finding a way to apply the nonprofit’s digital organizing and fundraising strategy—empowering regular people to work together to apply political pressure through strength in numbers—to issues important to communities of color.

Then the hurricane hit, leaving millions stranded and the news channels playing clips of Black Americans begging for help from rooftops and wading through neck-deep water. “Those in power don’t fear disappointing or neglecting or turning their back on Black folks,” Rucker says, articulating the problem that he saw.

He called a friend, the activist and now CNN host Van Jones, and they soon launched Color of Change. It began with a single email, sent to 1,200 people. Before long, they had 10,000 signatures on a high-profile petition demanding an urgent, robust response from local and federal officials. They had spent more than a year largely focused on the aftermath of Katrina when Rucker learned about six Black teenagers in Louisiana who were facing 20-year sentences after an altercation that left a white high school student hospitalized. The Black teens were being charged with attempted murder for what looked like a schoolyard fight. Color of Change sprang into action in support of the teens, who became known as the Jena 6, raising nearly $300,000 for their legal defense. With the case now in the spotlight, the local prosecutor reduced the charges.

Within a few years, Color of Change had amassed a powerful digital following and an email list of nearly a million people. It began launching even more high-­profile campaigns, including a 2009 effort to get Fox News host Glenn Beck, who called President Barack Obama a racist, kicked off the air, by applying pressure to advertisers. The group’s tactics—online boycotts, hashtags, and petitions—raised eyebrows in traditional civil rights spaces, but they filled an important void. “What they were able to do is step into a space where many entities in the social justice community and great society were still figuring it out,” said Derrick Johnson, national president of the NAACP.

When Fox News canceled Beck’s show two years later, Color of Change staffers gathered in the organization’s office to watch the final broadcast. By then, Rucker had realized two things: that his group’s digital activism could deliver results and that it would need new leadership to channel that energy toward even bigger fights—someone with a master’s understanding of power and influence.

Rucker reached out to Robinson, who at the time was second in command at the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD). In his six years there, Robinson had gained a reputation as a smart strategist, capable of targeting media companies to bend public opinion. But, by 2011, Robinson was ready for a new challenge.

“It was a big deal for a lot of Black folks that had worked inside the movement that I got to drive things,” he recalls of his time at GLAAD, “but I also saw the limitations of my representation.” So in 2011, he took a risk—and a pay cut—to become executive director of Color of Change, which then employed only five people full time. (Today, there are 153 employees.) “I went from having a lot of resources at my disposal to wondering would I have money three months from now to pay folks,” Robinson recalls.

From Presence to Power: How Color of Change has already shaped business and society

He quickly began exploring new directions for the organization. Color of Change continued its media campaigns, applying public pressure to turn TV advertisers against the likes of Bill O’Reilly, but also took the lead on a number of social justice issues, raising awareness of police and vigilante killings and advocating for the prosecution of police misconduct. Following the 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin, in Sanford, Florida, Color of Change was among the first groups to illuminate the role of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a conservative public policy organization, in the spread of so-called Stand Your Ground laws. After online petitions and a deluge of emails and phone calls from Color of Change members, Pepsi, Coca-Cola, and Kraft Foods announced that they would withdraw their memberships to ALEC. Three months after Martin’s death, with Color of Change members gathered outside Amazon’s annual shareholders meeting in Seattle, attempting to deliver a petition full of signatures, the e-commerce giant became the 16th company to end its ALEC membership.

“Companies invest a lot of effort and resources in managing the way people perceive and feel about their brand. So when you have a group of activists come out and start pointing out the hypocrisy in saying one thing and doing the other, that puts them in the danger zone,” says Nandini Jammi, cofounder of the online activist group Sleeping Giants, which also helped pioneer advertiser boycotts in the digital era. Robinson says that those early fights were not necessarily the organization’s most successful or influential, but they set the stage. “They allowed us to prove to members and those that joined us that investment in working with Color of Change was going to have benefit,” he says. “And it proved to the targets that they couldn’t ignore us.”

Robinson knew how to turn attention into power. He had grown up on eastern Long Island, New York, in a Black family that had landed there after the Great Migration. “When you’re Black [and living] in a community for multiple generations, you have a relationship to not just the Black community but the white people in the community,” Robinson recalls. “You have an idea about power and how you’re seen.” During high school, he produced and hosted a political talk show, Riverhead Teen Talk, on the local public access television channel, where he occasionally debated local callers. While studying political science at Marymount University, in Virginia, he worked as an organizer. A few years later, he appeared as a campaign manager on a short-lived Showtime reality show called American Candidate, in which 10 contestants mounted mock presidential bids.

One of Robinson’s earliest lessons was that “Black faces in high places” politics had its limits. Like most Black Americans of his generation, he’d grown up in a household with Ebony and Jetmagazines on the coffee table. A new wave of Black bankers, businessmen, and police chiefs was celebrated as the key to fundamentally changing a nation that, since its inception, has worked against its Black residents. But as more Black faces ascended­—even to the White House—inequity and disparity persisted.

This same realization later powered the Black Lives Matter movement. A new generation of young people became disenchanted as, even during the administration of the nation’s first Black president, it seemed little about the structures and systems under which they lived were changing. Robinson and Hatch, who joined Color of Change in 2012 and is now the group’s second in command, have steered the organization toward addressing these root problems even as they tackle of-the-moment issues that are making headlines.

Color of Change leverages its membership to move from “presence to power,” Robinson says, by forcing decision makers to confront the real people impacted by the choices they make. He says he also hopes to disrupt the “magical thinking” that is too common in activist spaces. “We’re trying to help people recognize that we can’t have charitable solutions to structural problems. You don’t solve the Flint water crisis just by sending water bottles. You don’t solve the crisis of inner-­city education and education at Black and brown schools by doing mentorship and service days. Those are ways to help, but those are not ways to undo the inequality,” he explains.

“People have a lot of Schoolhouse Rock theories about how change happens,” Robinson continues. “We’ve done a lot in our movement to talk about systems that hurt Black people. How do we actually change [them]? Otherwise we will get a lot more programs that work to fix Black people, and Black families, as opposed to working to fix the structures that hurt us.”

---

Perhaps no campaign has taken on more urgency for Color of Change, or been higher profile, than its battle with Facebook. For years, the organization has been among the groups pressuring the social media juggernaut to audit its internal diversity and inclusion efforts and publicly pressing the platform to more aggressively curb users and groups that post hate speech and calls to violence.

Despite periodically agreeing to a call or a meeting with civil rights organizations, Facebook had done frustratingly little in response to their demands, Robinson says. Moments after an hourlong video call with Zuckerberg and other Facebook officials in June, Robinson told The Washington Post: “What was clear coming out of that meeting is Mark has no real understanding of the history or current impact of voter suppression, racism, or discrimination. He lives in a bubble.”

[Photo: Dee Dwyer]

By early summer of 2020, the civil rights community was incensed that Facebook had allowed President Trump to declare “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” in response to the George Floyd protests, and infuriated that far-right groups continued to abuse the platform. “It became clear that no amount of bad press affected Facebook,” says Jessica González, co-CEO of Free Press, a media advocacy group that works closely with Color of Change in the tech sector. “It became clear that going after advertisers was going to be an important strategy.”

Color of Change began organizing an advertiser boycott. Leaning on its membership ranks, it petitioned major companies to refuse to spend money with Facebook until the platform made a serious commitment to addressing the spread of hate speech. A coalition of groups took out a full-page ad in the Los Angeles Times to announce the “Stop Hate for Profit” campaign, and placed a flurry of phone calls urging corporations to pause any ad buys on Facebook and other social media companies. At the time of Floyd’s death, many advertisers were already reconsidering their financial commitments due to the pandemic. Now, corporate America was scrambling for ways to show its support for racial justice. Once the first few companies signed on, others lined up. Soon, hundreds of companies had pulled or paused their advertising on Facebook and other platforms.

In July, Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg met with the campaign’s leaders, who demanded she take more seriously the threat created by allowing racism to fester on the platform. The meeting, Robinson said publicly, was a “disappointment.” His sharp comments were yet another part of the strategy, aimed at showing the company that small concessions wouldn’t be a means of blunting criticism in the future. Facebook ultimately committed to installing a more permanent civil rights infrastructure within the company. More recently, it’s taken steps to combat the spread of hate speech and ban the conspiracy group QAnon from the platform.

“While [the campaign] hasn’t led to as many changes as I would like, my little civil rights organization is taking on the biggest communications platform the world has ever known,” Robinson says. “And has forced a scenario in which Mark and Sheryl have to deal with our attacks, which are rooted in their failures, and also have to still work with us.”

Officials at Facebook say they now consider Color of Change a partner, albeit an at times adversarial one. “They have been an important part of some of the changes that we’ve been making, and I think that they are really masterful at what they do,” says Ru­chika Budhraja, a Facebook spokesperson who has been involved in the negotiations with Color of Change.

Ashley Boyd, vice president of advocacy and engagement at Mozilla, who works with Color of Change on diversity issues, says the technology space is particularly ripe for this kind of pressure. The sector’s “move fast and break things” mindset is often blamed for reinforcing unethical decision-making, but Boyd notes that it also makes many of these companies uniquely prepared to undergo significant changes quickly. Color of Change’s effectiveness, she says, stems from the way it uses storytelling to force companies to see the consequences of their actions for communities they are otherwise inclined to overlook. The organization has had particular success with Airbnb, which recently announced a new effort to track racism on its platform, and Pinterest, which banned images of plantation weddings in 2019.

[Photo: Dee Dwyer]

At the same time, Color of Change has redoubled its efforts in Hollywood. Building on the model Robinson learned at GLAAD, which fought for more complex portrayals of gay and lesbian people on television, Hatch has set out to alter the way Black Americans are shown on the big and small screens. The group has waged an all-out assault on any programming riddled with stereotypes. In addition to the Cops campaign, it stopped Oxygen from airing a reality series about the rapper Shawty Lo, titled All My Babies’ Mamas, which intended to make comedy of the fact that he’d fathered 11 children by 10 different women, and it petitioned Bravo to turn its cameras off during fights that broke out during its Real Housewives series.

The organization also now offers consulting services to Hollywood writers rooms and works directly with production companies to make sure they’re factoring in inclusion and representation from the very beginning of the process. Color of Change has released a groundbreaking report on the lack of diversity among writers and showrunners, and the first-of-its-kind “Normalizing Injustice” study, published in early 2020, on how crime entertainment distorts our understanding of the criminal justice system. Robinson and his team have worked with creatives like director Ava DuVernay and producer Dream Hampton to promote award-winning projects such as the Central Park Five miniseries When They See Us and Surviving R. Kelly.

Hatch, who launched Color of Change’s political action committee in 2018, also used DuVernay’s When They See Us to encourage Black voters to push for reform-­minded district attorneys. The organization helped to elect more than a dozen in the 2018 midterms, and released a full slate of endorsements ahead of the 2020 election, signaling a new front for Color of Change.

While Robinson concedes that his organization has made progress, this work is part of a long game. None of us knows what will bring the next moment of reckoning. But when it comes, Color of Change, and its millions of members, will be ready.

---

Wesley Lowery is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of They Can’t Kill Us All: The Story of the Struggle for Black Lives.

Jury Awards $27 Million To Massachusetts Man Wrongfully Convicted Of Murder

Mark and Mia Schand, wearing T-shirts from the innocence organization Centurion Ministries in 2015, just want to move forward.Karen Brown/New England Public Radio

A man who served nearly three decades for a murder he didn’t commit was awarded $27 million — $1 million for each year he was in prison — by a federal jury last month. 

When the jury foreman read out the award, “everybody started crying and stuff like that,” said Mark Schand.

Schand was convicted in 1987 of a nightclub shooting in Springfield, Mass., that killed a female bystander. In 2013, a judge considered new evidence — uncovered by the innocence organization Centurion Ministries — and let him go. 

In 2015, Schand sued the city of Springfield and four police officers for violating his civil rights. A judge dismissed the lawsuit against the city — that case is currently awaiting appeal — but allowed the one against the officers, all retired: Elmer McMahon, Leonard Scammons, Raymond Muise and Michael Reid. 

‘Blind Injustice’ Opera Sets Out To Open Eyes About Wrongful Conviction Rates

When the case went to trial, Schand’s legal team relied on evidence that the officers used “unduly suggestive” techniques when identifying him as a suspect. 

The jury decided that was worth $1 million for every year spent in prison, an outcome even his lawyers hadn’t predicted.

“What are 27 years of a person’s life worth? That is a very interesting philosophical question,” said Heather McDevitt, one of Schand’s attorneys. “There are experiences that can never be recreated. There is the pain and suffering and subjection to violence and isolation and loneliness.”Article continues after sponsor message

For Schand, the verdict is less about the money and more about the vindication. He got no help from the government after he was released. He had to fight the state attorney general’s office for a few hundred thousand dollars in statutory compensation — $450,000, minus attorneys’ fees — and even then, no one apologized. 

“After all this time, this is the first time there was some acknowledgement that someone [had] done something in my wrongful conviction, someone was responsible for it,” he said. “And, you know, that was almost better than the monetary damages.”

He Went To Prison For A Murder He Didn’t Commit, Then Met The Man Who Put Him There

Still, Schand’s award is significant for a few reasons. Fewer than half of all exonerees have even filed a civil lawsuit for their wrongful conviction, according to Jeffrey Gutman of the Public Justice Advocacy Clinic at George Washington University. Out of those plaintiffs, Gutman said, only half have won any money, with an average award of $310,000. 

“So, comparatively, Mr. Schand’s verdict was quite high, although there have been other jury verdicts near or over $1 million per year [of incarceration],” Gutman said. 

In most cases, to win a lawsuit for wrongful conviction, plaintiffs have to prove there was official misconduct, not just a mistake. 

“It’s an incredibly high burden to meet to win a civil settlement,” says Rebecca Brown of the Innocence Project, which lobbies states to make it much easier to get compensation for wrongful conviction. As it stands, there’s a wide discrepancy among compensation statutes across the country. 

Plotted From A Prison Cot, Wrongly Accused Man Whips Smoothie Dream Into Reality

Brown also said high jury awards such as Schand’s — however justified — can overshadow the injustice that people have suffered. She points to the $41 million settlement shared by the five men wrongfully convicted in the infamous Central Park jogger case. 

“People say, ‘Oh, my gosh, that’s so much money,'” Brown said. But as one of the men put it: “I would have rather had my childhood back.”

The attorney for Springfield, Ed Pikula, wrote in an email that the city is considering options for appeal and that state law limits the city’s liability to $1 million per officer – or a total of $4 million. 

Schand said he’s so used to the system failing him that he’s not counting on any of the money. After a series of manual labor jobs, he now runs his own smoothie business in New Britain, Conn. 

“I’m 55 years old. It’s all downhill from here for me,” he said, with a wry laugh. “If I ever get [the money], I’m just going to be comforted by the fact that I know maybe my kids will be all right and they won’t have to struggle as much as I did — before I was incarcerated and since I’ve been home.”

His wife, Mia, does allow herself to daydream about the money. “We are looking for a new home,” she said, “and just some peace in our life.”

Schand is mostly looking forward to a time when he can go to a grocery store without people asking about his case. And he will be happy to never set foot in a courtroom again.

How the Red Cross Raised Half a Billion Dollars for Haiti ­and Built Six Home

Marie Arago, special to ProPublica

How the Red Cross Raised Half a Billion Dollars for Haiti ­and Built Six Homes

Even as the group has publicly celebrated its work, insider accounts detail a string of failures

by Justin Elliott, ProPublica, and Laura Sullivan, NPRJune 3, 2015

THE NEIGHBORHOOD OF CAMPECHE sprawls up a steep hillside in Haiti’s capital city, Port-au-Prince. Goats rustle in trash that goes forever uncollected. Children kick a deflated volleyball in a dusty lot below a wall with a hand-painted logo of the American Red Cross.

In late 2011, the Red Cross launched a multimillion-dollar project to transform the desperately poor area, which was hit hard by the earthquake that struck Haiti the year before. The main focus of the project — called LAMIKA, an acronym in Creole for “A Better Life in My Neighborhood” — was building hundreds of permanent homes.

THE LATEST

Internal Reports: Red Cross May Not Know How Millions Were Spent July 21

Red Cross Holds a Press Conference In Haiti. It Doesn’t Go Well. June 12

Reddit chat with the reporters June 12

DOCUMENTS: INSIDE THE RED CROSS’ HAITI FAILURES

Confidential memo warns of “failed results”

Report on key project finds no “contributions of any sort to the well being of households”

Red Cross CEO emails about “wonderful helicopter idea” to spend money

Today, not one home has been built in Campeche. Many residents live in shacks made of rusty sheet metal, without access to drinkable water, electricity or basic sanitation. When it rains, their homes flood and residents bail out mud and water.

The Red Cross received an outpouring of donations after the quake, nearly half a billion dollars.

The group has publicly celebrated its work. But in fact, the Red Cross has repeatedly failed on the ground in Haiti. Confidential memos, emails from worried top officers, and accounts of a dozen frustrated and disappointed insiders show the charity has broken promises, squandered donations, and made dubious claims of success.

The Red Cross says it has provided homes to more than 130,000 people. But the actual number of permanent homes the group has built in all of Haiti: six.

After the earthquake, Red Cross CEO Gail McGovern unveiled ambitious plans to “develop brand-newcommunities.” None has ever been built.

Aid organizations from around the world have struggled after the earthquake in Haiti, the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country. But ProPublica and NPR’s investigation shows that many of the Red Cross’s failings in Haiti are of its own making. They are also part of a larger pattern in which the organization has botched delivery of aid after disasters such as Superstorm Sandy. Despite its difficulties, the Red Cross remains the charity of choice for ordinary Americans and corporations alike after natural disasters.

One issue that has hindered the Red Cross’ work in Haiti is an overreliance on foreigners who could not speak French or Creole, current and former employees say.

In a blistering 2011 memo, the then-director of the Haiti program, Judith St. Fort, wrote that the group was failing in Haiti and that senior managers had made “very disturbing” remarks disparaging Haitian employees. St. Fort, who is Haitian American, wrote that the comments included, “he is the only hard working one among them” and “the ones that we have hired are not strong so we probably should not pay close attention to Haitian CVs.”

The Red Cross won’t disclose details of how it has spent the hundreds of millions of dollars donated for Haiti. But our reporting shows that less money reached those in need than the Red Cross has said.

Lacking the expertise to mount its own projects, the Red Cross ended up giving much of the money to other groups to do the work. Those groups took out a piece of every dollar to cover overhead and management. Even on the projects done by others, the Red Cross had its own significant expenses – in one case, adding up to a third of the project’s budget.

Where did the half billion raised for Haiti go? The Red Cross won’t say.

In statements, the Red Cross cited the challenges all groups have faced in post-quake Haiti, including the country’s dysfunctional land title system.

“Like many humanitarian organizations responding in Haiti, the American Red Cross met complications in relation to government coordination delays, disputes over land ownership, delays at Haitian customs, challenges finding qualified staff who were in short supply and high demand, and the cholera outbreak, among other challenges,” the charity said.

The group said it responded quickly to internal concerns, including hiring an expert to train staff on cultural competency after St. Fort’s memo. While the group won’t provide a breakdown of its projects, the Red Cross said it has done more than 100. The projects include repairing 4,000 homes, giving several thousand families temporary shelters, donating $44 million for food after the earthquake, and helping fund the construction of a hospital.

“Millions of Haitians are safer, healthier, more resilient, and better prepared for future disasters thanks to generous donations to the American Red Cross,” McGovern wrote in a recent report marking the fifth anniversary of the earthquake.

In other promotional materials, the Red Cross said it has helped “more than 4.5 million” individual Haitians “get back on their feet.”

It has not provided details to back up the claim. And Jean-Max Bellerive, Haiti’s prime minister at the time of the earthquake, doubts the figure, pointing out the country’s entire population is only about 10 million.

“No, no,” Bellerive said of the Red Cross’ claim, “it’s not possible.”

---

When the earthquake struck Haiti in January 2010, the Red Cross was facing a crisis of its own. McGovern had become chief executive just 18 months earlier, inheriting a deficit and an organization that had faced scandals after 9/11 and Katrina.

Gail McGovern (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Inside the Red Cross, the Haiti disaster was seen as “a spectacular fundraising opportunity,” recalled one former official who helped organize the effort. Michelle Obama, the NFL and a long list of celebrities appealed for donations to the group.

The Red Cross kept soliciting money well after it had enough for the emergency relief that is the group’s stock in trade. Doctors Without Borders, in contrast, stopped fundraising off the earthquake after it decided it had enough money. The donations to the Red Cross helped the group erase its more-than $100 million deficit.

The Red Cross ultimately raised far more than any other charity.

A year after the quake, McGovern announced that the Red Cross would use the donations to make a lasting impact in Haiti.

We asked the Red Cross to show us around its projects in Haiti so we could see the results of its work. It declined. So earlier this year we went to Campeche to see one of the group’s signature projects for ourselves.

Street vendors in the dusty neighborhood immediately pointed us to Jean Jean Flaubert, the head of a community group that the Red Cross set up as a local sounding board.

Sitting with us in their sparse one-room office, Flaubert and his colleagues grew angry talking about the Red Cross. They pointed to the lack of progress in the neighborhood and the healthy salaries paid to expatriate aid workers.

“What the Red Cross told us is that they are coming here to change Campeche. Totally change it,” said Flaubert. “Now I do not understand the change that they are talking about. I think the Red Cross is working for themselves.”

The Red Cross’ initial plan said the focus would be building homes — an internal proposalput the number at 700. Each would have finished floors, toilets, showers, even rainwater collection systems. The houses were supposed to be finished in January 2013.

The Red Cross promised to build hundreds of new homes in Campeche but none have been built. Many residents still live in crude shacks. (Marie Arago, special to ProPublica)

None of that ever happened. Carline Noailles, who was the project’s manager in Washington, said it was endlessly delayed because the Red Cross “didn’t have the know-how.”

Another former official who worked on the Campeche project said, “Everything takes four times as long because it would be micromanaged from DC, and they had no development experience.”

Shown an English-language press release from the Red Cross website, Flaubert was stunned to learn of the project’s $24 million budget — and that it is due to end next year.

“Not only is [the Red Cross] not doing it,” Flaubert said, “now I’m learning that the Red Cross is leaving next year. I don’t understand that.” (The Red Cross says it did tell community leaders about the end date. It also accused us of “creating ill will in the community which may give rise to a security incident.”)

The project has since been reshaped and downscaled. A road is being built. Some existing homes have received earthquake reinforcement and a few schools are being repaired. Some solar street lights have been installed, though many broke and residents say others are unreliable.

The group’s most recent press release on the project cites achievements such as training school children in disaster response.

The Red Cross said it has to scale back its housing plans because it couldn’t acquire the rights to land. No homes will be built.

Other Red Cross infrastructure projects also fizzled.

A Red Cross effort to save Haitians from cholera was crippled by internal issues. “None of these people had to die,” said a Haitian official.

In January 2011, McGovern announced a $30 million partnership with the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID. The agency would build roads and other infrastructure in at least two locations where the Red Cross would build new homes.

But it took more than two and a half years, until August 2013, for the Red Cross just to sign an agreement with USAID on the program, and even that was for only one site. The program was ultimately canceled because of a land dispute.

A Government Accountability Office report attributed the severe delays to problems “in securing land title and because of turnover in Red Cross leadership” in its Haiti program.

Other groups also ran into trouble with land titles and other issues. But they also ultimately built 9,000 homes compared to the Red Cross’ six.

Asked about the Red Cross’ housing projects in Haiti, David Meltzer, the group’s general counsel and chief international officer, said changing conditions forced changes in plans. “If we had said, ‘All we’re going to do is build new homes,’ we’d still be looking for land,” he said.

The USAID project’s collapse left the Red Cross grasping for ways to spend money earmarked for it.

“Any ideas on how to spend the rest of this?? (Besides the wonderful helicopter idea?),” McGovern wrote to Meltzer in a November 2013 email obtained by ProPublica and NPR. “Can we fund Conrad’s hospital? Or more to PiH[Partners in Health]? Any more shelter projects?”

Jean Jean Flaubert says the Red Cross promised to transform his neighborhood. “Now I do not understand the change that they are talking about,” he said. (Marie Arago, special to ProPublica)

It’s not clear what helicopter idea McGovern was referring to or if it was ever carried out. The Red Cross would say only that her comments were “grounded in the American Red Cross’ strategy and priorities, which focus on health and housing.”

Another signature project, known in Creole as “A More Resilient Great North,” is supposed to rehabilitate roads in poor, rural communities and to help them get clean water and sanitation.

But two years after it started, the $13 million effort has been faltering badly. An internal evaluation from March found residents were upset because nothing had been done to improve water access or infrastructure or to make “contributions of any sort to the well being of households,” the report said.

So much bad feeling built up in one area that the population “rejects the project.”

The Red Cross says 91% of donations went to help Haitians. That’s not true.

Instead of making concrete improvements to living conditions, the Red Cross has launched hand-washing education campaigns. The internal evaluation noted that these were “not effective when people had no access to water and no soap.” (The Red Cross declined to comment on the project.)

The group’s failures went beyond just infrastructure.

When a cholera epidemic raged through Haiti nine months after the quake, the biggest part of the Red Cross’ response — a plan to distribute soap and oral rehydration salts — was crippled by “internal issues that go unaddressed,” wrote the director of the Haiti program in her May 2011 memo.

Throughout that year, cholera was a steady killer. By September 2011, when the death toll had surpassed 6,000, the project was still listed as “very behind schedule” according to another internal document.

The Red Cross said in a statement that its cholera response, including a vaccination campaign, has continued for years and helped millions of Haitians.

But while other groups also struggled early responding to cholera, some performed well.

“None of these people had to die. That’s what upsets me,” said Paul Christian Namphy, a Haitian water and sanitation official who helped lead the effort to fight cholera. He says early failures by the Red Cross and other NGOs had a devastating impact. “These numbers should have been zero.”

---

So why did the Red Cross’ efforts fall so short? It wasn’t just that Haiti is a hard place to work.

“They collected nearly half a billion dollars,” said a congressional staffer who helped oversee Haiti reconstruction. “But they had a problem. And the problem was that they had absolutely no expertise.”

Lee Malany was in charge of the Red Cross’ shelter program in Haiti starting in 2010. He remembers a meeting in Washington that fall where officials did not seem to have any idea how to spend millions of dollars set aside for housing. Malany says the officials wanted to know which projects would generate good publicity, not which projects would provide the most homes.

“When I walked out of that meeting I looked at the people that I was working with and said, ‘You know this is very disconcerting, this is depressing,’” he recalled.

The Red Cross said in a statement its Haiti program has never put publicity over delivering aid.

Malany resigned the next year from his job in Haiti. “I said there’s no reason for me to stay here. I got on the plane and left.”

Transitional shelters like these on the outskirts of Port-Au-Prince, paid for by the Red Cross, typically last three to five years. (Marie Arago, special to ProPublica)

Sometimes it wasn’t a matter of expertise, but whether anybody was filling key jobs. An April 2012 organizational chart obtained by ProPublica and NPR lists 9 of 30 leadership positions in Haiti as vacant, including slots for experts on health and shelter.

The Red Cross said vacancies and turnover were inevitable because of “the security situation, separation from family for international staff, and the demanding nature of the work.”

The constant upheaval took a toll. Internal documents refer to repeated attempts over years to “finalize” and “complete” a strategic plan for the Haiti program, efforts that were delayed by changes in senior management. As late as March 2014, more than four years into a six-year program, an internal update cites a “revised strategy” still awaiting “final sign-off.”

The Red Cross said settling on a plan early would have been a mistake. “It would be hard to create the perfect plan from the beginning in a complicated place like Haiti,” it said. “But we also need to begin, so we create plans that are continually revised.”

The Red Cross says it provided homes to more than 130,000 Haitians. But they didn’t.

Those plans were further undermined by the Red Cross’ reliance on expats. Noailles, the Haitian development professional who worked for the Red Cross on the Campeche project, said expat staffers struggled in meetings with local officials.

“Going to meetings with the community when you don’t speak the language is not productive,” she said. Sometimes, she recalled, expat staffers would skip such meetings altogether.

The Red Cross said it has “made it a priority to hire Haitians” despite lots of competition for local professionals, and that over 90 percent of its staff is Haitian. The charity said it used a local human resources firm to help.

Yet very few Haitians have made it into the group’s top echelons in Haiti, according to five current and former Red Cross staffers as well as staff lists obtained by ProPublica and NPR.

That not only affected the group’s ability to work in Haiti, it was also expensive.

According to an internal Red Cross budgeting document for the project in Campeche, the project manager – a position reserved for an expatriate – was entitled to allowances for housing, food and other expenses, home leave trips, R&R four times a year, and relocation expenses. In all, it added up to $140,000.

Compensation for a senior Haitian engineer — the top local position — was less than one-third of that, $42,000 a year.

Shelim Dorval, a Haitian administrator who worked for the Red Cross coordinating travel and housing for expatriate staffers, recalled thinking it was a waste to spend so much to bring in people with little knowledge of Haiti when locals were available.

“For each one of those expats, they were having high salaries, staying in a fancy house, and getting vacation trips back to their countries,” Dorval said. “A lot of money was spent on those people who were not Haitian, who had nothing to do with Haiti. The money was just going back to the United States.”

---

Soon after the earthquake, McGovern, the Red Cross CEO, said the group would make sure donors knew exactly what happened to their money.

The Red Cross would “lead the effort in transparency,” she pledged. “We are happy to share the way we are spending our dollars.”

That hasn’t happened. The Red Cross’ public reports offer only broad categories about where $488 million in donations has gone. The biggest category is shelter, at about $170 million. The others include health, emergency relief and disaster preparedness.

After the earthquake, Red Cross CEO Gail McGovern unveiled plans to “develop brand-new communities.” None has ever been built. (Marie Arago, special to ProPublica)

It has declined repeated requests to disclose the specific projects, to explain how much money went to each or to say what the results of each project were.

There is reason to doubt the Red Cross’ claims that it helped 4.5 million Haitians. An internal evaluation found that in some areas, the Red Cross reported helping more people than even lived in the communities. In other cases, the figures were low, and in others double-counting went uncorrected.

In describing its work, the Red Cross also conflates different types of aid, making it more difficult to assess the charity’s efforts in Haiti.

For example, while the Red Cross says it provided more than 130,000 people with homes, that includes thousands of people who were not actually given homes, but rather were “trained in proper construction techniques.” (That was first reported by the Haiti blog of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.)

The figure includes people who got short-term rental assistance or were housed in several thousand “transitional shelters,” which are temporary structures that can get eaten up by termites or tip over in storms. It also includes modest improvements on 5,000 temporary shelters.

The Red Cross also won’t break down what portion of donations went to overhead.

How the Red Cross’ Overhead Claim Stacks Up

The Red Cross says that for each dollar donated, 91 cents went to Haiti. But here’s what actually happened in one $5.4 million project to improve temporary shelters.

Overhead and Management

Spent on Doing the Work

What They Say

What Actually Happened

9%

91%

9%Red Cross’ overhead

24%Red Cross’ program management and other

~7%Other groups’ overhead

60%

Source: American Red Cross and ProPublica Analysis
Credit: Sisi Wei/ProPublica

McGovern told CBS News a few months after the quake, “Minus the 9 cents overhead, 91 cents on the dollar will be going to Haiti. And I give you my word and my commitment, I’m banking my integrity, my own personal sense of integrity on that statement.”

But the reality is that less money went to Haiti than 91 percent. That’s because in addition to the Red Cross’ 9 percent overhead, the other groups that got grants from the Red Cross also have their own overhead.

In one case, the Red Cross sent $6 million to the International Federation of the Red Cross for rental subsidies to help Haitians leave tent camps. The IFRC then took out 26 percent for overhead and what the IFRC described as program-related “administration, finance, human resources” and similar costs.

Beyond all that, the Red Cross also spends another piece of each dollar for what it describes as “program costs incurred by the American Red Cross in managing” the projects done by other groups.

The American Red Cross’ management and other costs consumed an additional 24 percent of the money on one project, according to the group’s statements and internal documents. The actual work, upgrading shelters, was done by the Swiss and Spanish Red Cross societies.

“It’s a cycle of overhead,” said Jonathan Katz, the Associated Press reporter in Haiti at the time of the earthquake who tracked post-disaster spending for his book, The Big Truck That Went By. “It was always going to be the American Red Cross taking a 9 percent cut, re-granting to another group, which would take out their cut.”

Given the results produced by the Red Cross’ projects in Haiti, Bellerive, the former prime minister, said he has a hard time fathoming what’s happened to donors’ money.

“Five hundred million dollars in Haiti is a lot of money,” he said. “I’m not a big mathematician, but I can make some additions. I know more or less the cost of things. Unless you don’t pay for the gasoline the same price I was paying, unless you pay people 20 times what I was paying them, unless the cost of the house you built was five times the cost I was paying, it doesn’t add up for me.”

A resident in a Port-Au-Prince transitional shelter paid for by the Red Cross. (Marie Arago, special to ProPublica)

This story was co-published with NPR. Mitzy-Lynn Hyacinthe contributed reporting. Design direction by David Sleight, production by Hannah Birch.

Read about how the Red Cross botched key elements of its mission after Superstorm Sandy and Hurricane Isaac in PR Over People: The Red Cross’ Secret Disaster. And about how the Red Cross’ CEO has been serially misleading about where donors’ dollars are going.

If you have information about the Red Cross or about other international aid projects, please email justin@propublica.org.

---

Justin Elliott is a ProPublica reporter covering politics and government accountability. Previously, he was a reporter at Salon.com and TPMmuckraker and news editor at Talking Points Memo.

Laura Sullivan is a NPR News investigative correspondent whose work has cast a light on some of the country’s most disadvantaged people.

Don’t Give Money To The Red Cross, It Won’t Save Houston

It has proven itself unequal to the task of massive disaster relief. We need a new kind of humanitarian response.

By Jonathan M. Katz

In 2004, I was just starting my first full-time job in a Washington newsroomwhen disaster struck. It was on the other side of the world: an extraordinarily powerful earthquake in Sumatra, Indonesia, that triggered a tsunami across the Indian Ocean. But thanks to CNN it felt like the anguish and terror were happening in the next cubicle. I still remember the fear on the fishermen’s faces and watching mothers cry as they searched for their children in the waves. Powerless, eager to help, I did the only thing I could think of: I went online and sent $20 to the American Red Cross.

Thirteen years later, we’re watching another disaster, this time much closer to home. Tropical Storm Harvey, supercharged by a freakishly warm Gulf of Mexico, has slammed into the Texas coast and is now running a dayslong conveyor belt carrying trillions of gallons of water from the ocean to the sky to the bayous and streets of Houston. Highways have become rivers in America’s fourth-largest city. Apartment complexes are filling up like bathtubs. Dams are nearing failure. Thousands have had to be rescued from the still-rising floodwaters in the overbuilt, improperly drained city. The scariest part is that, with the water still rising, no one can really know how bad the damage has been so far or what is to come. Once again, most of us outside the zone feel powerless but want to help. Once again, leaders and noble souls are telling us the best way to do so is to turn to the best known, most bipartisanly loved brand in humanitarian relief.

But I won’t be donating to the Red Cross this time. And after years of reporting on and inside some of the biggest disasters of the decade and change, I know what a costly mistake the focus on donating anywhere can be.

Part of the problem is the American Red Cross’ track record when it comes to disasters. It isn’t great. I learned this best in Haiti, where I survived the Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake and ran the Associated Press bureau from 2007 until 2011. When the earthquake struck, killing an estimated 100,000 to 316,000 people, American Red Cross CEO Gail McGovern’s staff swung into action doing what it does best: raising money. Their appeal to “save lives,” aided by endorsements from President Obama and celebrities, and fueled by a pioneering text message campaign, raised a staggering $488 million.

It quickly became clear that the organization’s biggest problem would be figuring out what to do with all that cash. The U.S. chapter had just three full-time staff in Haiti at the time of the disaster. Though it soon sent more, and subcontracted staff from the local Haitian Red Cross, the truth was that there wasn’t all that much they could do: ARC isn’t a medical aid group à la Doctors Without Borders. It doesn’t do development work or specialize in rebuilding destroyed neighborhoods. What it does best is provide immediate assistance—often in the form of blankets, hygiene kits, or temporary shelter—and as incredibly destructive as the earthquake was, there wasn’t half a billion dollars of tarps and hygiene kits to hand out. Staffers came up with all kinds of creative ways to unload the money, including handing it off to other aid groups that could use it better (after ARC had taken its customary 9 percent administrative cut). As it became increasingly clear that the entire earthquake response, from the lowliest neighborhood to the top floor of the United Nations Secretariat—had been a failure, ARC found itself scrambling to explain why the half a billion dollars it took hadn’t made a substantive difference in survivors’ lives. “There’s only so much money that can be forced through the emergency phase,” an ARC spokeswoman told me when I asked how it was possible that just a third of the money it had raised had even been committed, much less spent, two years later.

What no one at the organization bothered to do was explain to the public—in Haiti or back in the States—that it had never needed anywhere near that much money in the first place. (In contrast, some NGOs state their fundraising goals in advance and cap or redirect donations once they have exceeded those amounts.)

ARC was roundly blasted in the U.S. for its shambolic response to 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, with international observers warning that elements were so bad that they verged on criminal wrongdoing. Seven years later, despite an internal retooling effort, it failed again in 2012’s Superstorm Sandy and Hurricane Isaac. (The response was “worse than the storm,” one Red Cross driver told ProPublica during its jaw-dropping investigation.) Typically, the organization has had more success responding to small-scale disasters; it’s common to hear stories people tell of the blankets and compassion they got from Red Cross volunteers after house fires. But even there, they’ve been getting into trouble: ARC’s 2015 response to a string of northern California wildfires was so bad—showing up unequipped and unprepared, shutting down other volunteer operations, and then failing to provide promised food or shelter on its own—that locals shunned the organization to focus on their own relief efforts.

Worse than what we know is what we don’t. The ARC, which boasts annual revenues of more than $2.6 billion, is notoriously opaque when it comes to what it does with the money it raises for disasters. It has never produced a meaningful breakdown of its spending after the Haiti earthquake. If you look at RedCross.org right now, you’ll see a prominent link inviting you to “make a difference” by donating to its Harvey effort. But nowhere does it say what it will do with the money. A tiny video shows empty cots in a shelter.

When I emailed and called the organization’s full-time media relations department Sunday and Monday asking how much it had raised so far, how much it thought the group might need, and what Red Cross volunteers and staff were doing in the response to Hurricane Harvey, I eventually got back this reply: “At this point in our active disaster response, we are unable to answer your questions by your deadline. Thank you for understanding.” I followed up again. A few hours later, the organization sent a second note saying it was providing food, cots, blankets, and other support to 6,000 people in various shelters across the region—again with no information about the cost or money raised so far.

It isn’t just journalists who get the shaft. ARC’s leaders have misled Congress. In a scathing 2015 report, the federal Government Accountability Office noted that “no regular, independent evaluations are conducted of the impact or effectiveness of the Red Cross’s disaster services.”

As ProPublica’s Justin Elliott has reported, many of these issues are the result of a team of former AT&T executives taking over a complex organization—one that manages tasks as critical and disparate as blood-banking and providing resources to military families, while operating in a blurred, neither-fish-nor-fowl zone with some of the privileges of a government agency (such as free rent for its D.C. headquarters) but the moneymaking latitude and lack of oversight of a private corporation.

ARC and its defenders sometimes protest that there’s too much focus on them; that scores of other actors have also failed in their responses to the same disasters. In part, that’s just the other side of the double-edged sword that comes with having a higher profile than others and raising far more money than anyone else—for being, as McGovern likes to say, “a brand to die for.”

The hard reality is that we still don’t know what the needs in Houston are going to be or who will be best to respond to them.

But in another way, they are entirely right. There is too much focus on the ARC in disasters such as Harvey, in a way that goes beyond any one organization. The way our society handles disasters—first the calamity; then the outpouring of sympathy and donations; then the long, slow rebuild—is wrong. As humans have long known, it is easier, cheaper, and better to mitigate or prevent disasters from happening than to rescue victims and rebuild after them. We’ve known for centuries about the threat of hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico. Experts have warned for years that the Texas coast needed to make serious investments to prepare for nigh-inevitable storms, including preparing mitigation specifically for intense, unprecedented floods worsened in part by climate change. It seems that some, including many of Houston’s hospitals, heeded those warnings and are benefiting from the preparation. Other sectors did not. At a systemic level, instead of taking those threats seriously, Texans elected a governor who distorts facts about climate change. Americans picked a president who—days before this disaster and moments before rushing to the defense of rampaging neo-Nazis—announced in front of his gilded elevator that he was scrapping federal construction standards that had required new projects to account for climate change’s effect on storms like Harvey.

Local news organizations in Texas are maintaining lists of organizations, both local and run by the Red Cross, where those affected by the storm can get help and those inclined can send donations. Experts and experience say that, if you are going to donate to anyone from outside the disaster zone, send cash, not stuff. Boxes full of food, clothes, or other stuff will clog up supply lines and as likely as not go unused.

Yet the hard reality is that we still don’t know what the needs in Houston and other parts of Texas or Louisiana are going to be or who will be best to respond to them. Millions of people are still in the middle of the storm, with the National Hurricane Center warning that some areas could get double the already awe-inducing amounts of rain they’ve already received. Survivors, in other words, haven’t even gotten past the emergency to take stock of the damage and really begin the difficult relief phase; if this was an earthquake, the ground would still be shaking.

It is difficult for rescuers to get in. There is nowhere for most people to go. While there are heroic efforts going on right now by locals and neighbors to save as many as they can from the floods—efforts that authorities should encourage and help coordinate—the hard, frustrating reality is that there is not very much an untrained outsider can do to help once a complex disaster has begun. And with, at a bare minimum, hundreds of billions of dollars in damage expected and future storms on the way, the costs in cleaning up this mess and getting people back into their old lives again are going to be astronomical, on the level that only wealthy and powerful governments, and the combined power of their citizenry, will be able to address.

Top Comment

The author says we should “stop debating the stop debating the best place to send $20” and instead fully commit to fixing everything damaged, prevent future disasters, and address climate change. No. Send the $20 now.  More…

Some people get personally offended by talk like this. They are seeing pain, they are being generous, and they hope it might help—just like I did watching the pictures from Indonesia from my cubicle years ago. The people suffering in this storm deserve all of that and more. But what you learn when you really dive into these situations is that momentary intentions, no matter how kind, are not enough—not on this scale. Those past, ineffective, and opaque disaster responses, from Haiti to New Jersey to the Gulf Coast, have created a legacy of mistrust, not only of the Red Cross but of the entire humanitarian aid apparatus its iconic brand represents. We can’t afford to do that again.

If we really care about the people of Houston and the rest of the Gulf Coast, we have to commit fully to a combined, sustained, serious response to recover and rebuild—meaning lots of money, lots of attention to helping those areas adapt for the future, and lots of concern for the people who we know are most vulnerable. We all need to come together to prevent future disasters, whether the growing risk of a major Oklahoma earthquake, a Caribbean tsunami, and especially the many threats we face from climate change. The sooner we acknowledge and act on that and stop debating the best place to send $20, the better off all of us will be.

Marshawn Lynch Gives 2,000 Kids Free Water-Park Tickets

Marshawn Lynch Gives 2,000 Kids Free Water-Park Tickets

Marshawn Lynch is closely tied to the Oakland Community.

The giveaway will take place this Saturday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Interested parties should go to Lynch’s Beast Mode store in Oakland, where the first 2,000 kids to show up will receive tickets.

Check out the full rundown, sent from Lynch’s Twitter account:

It’s a generous move on Lynch’s part, especially considering that one junior admission pass to Raging Waters San Jose costs $28.99, meaning $58,000 worth of tickets are being handed out.

Children have always been at the forefront of Lynch’s philanthropy. The running back once gave out free haircuts to Seattle kids with good grades, and he’s been holding his summer clinic, the “Fam 1st Family Youth Football Camp,” for more than a decade.

With less than three months remaining before the start of the NFL season, Lynch is expected to be an important contributor on a Raiders team that went 12-4 in 2016. He saw his last professional action two years ago, when he rushed for 417 yards in 6 games for the Seattle Seahawks.