Inmates sue to watch solar eclipse after New York orders prison lockdown
Inmates in New York are suing the state corrections department over the decision to lock down prisons during next Monday’s total solar eclipse.
The suit filed on Friday in federal court in upstate New York argues that the 8 April lockdown violates inmates’ constitutional rights to practice their faiths by preventing them from taking part in a religiously significant event.
The plaintiffs are six men with varying religious backgrounds who are incarcerated at the Woodbourne Correctional Facility in Woodbourne. They include a Baptist, a Muslim, a Seventh-Day Adventist and two practitioners of Santería, as well as an atheist.
“A solar eclipse is a rare, natural phenomenon with great religious significance to many,” the complaint reads, noting that Bible passages describe an eclipse-like phenomenon during Jesus’s crucifixion while sacred Islamic works describes a similar event when the Prophet Muhammad’s son died.
The celestial event, which was last visible in the US in 2017 and won’t be seen in the country again until 2044, “warrant[s] gathering, celebration, worship, and prayer”, the complaint reads.
The lawsuit states that one of the named plaintiffs, an atheist, received special permission last month to view the eclipse using glasses that would be provided by the state, but that was before the system-wide lockdown was issued.
Four of the other plaintiffs subsequently sought permission but were denied by officials who ruled the solar eclipse was not listed as a holy day for their religions, the lawsuit states. The sixth inmate said he never received a response.
Thomas Mailey, a corrections department spokesperson, said the agency does not comment on pending litigation, but takes all requests for religious accommodations under consideration. He said those related to viewing the eclipse are currently under review.
Daniel Martuscello III, the department’s acting commissioner, issued a memo on 11 March announcing that all state correctional facilities will operate on a holiday schedule next Monday.
That means incarcerated individuals will remain in their housing
units except for emergency situations from 2pm to 5pm, which are generally the normal hours for outdoor recreation in prisons, according to the lawsuit.
There will also be no visitation at nearly two dozen prisons in the path of totality next Monday, while visitation at other correctional facilities will end at 2pm.
Martuscello said the department will distribute solar eclipse safety glasses for staff and incarcerated individuals at prisons in the path of totality so they can view the eclipse from their assigned work location or housing units.
Communities in western and northern reaches of the state are expected to have the best viewing of the total eclipse, including Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Lake Placid and Plattsburgh.
The total eclipse is expected to be seen in those parts of New York around 3:15pm ET and last mere minutes as the moon passes between the Earth and the sun, temporarily blocking the sun and turning day into night.
a volunteer with the medical charity MedGlobal. Normally he works at a trauma centre on Chicago’s south side, where he regularly deals with gunshot wounds.
“I did more trauma procedures on paediatric patients in the three weeks that I was at Nasser than I did in the 10 years that I’ve been practising in the US,” he said.
The doctor said he treated five children he believes were shot by snipers because the placing of the bullets suggested they were not hit randomly but targeted.
“They were mostly shot in the thorax, the chest area, some in the abdomen. There was one boy shot in the face. As a result he had a shattered jaw. There were two children who had been shot in the chest, young, under the age of 10, who did not survive. Two others, one shot in the abdomen, did survive. They were still recovering in the hospital when I left,” he said.
Ahmad noted the children were often shot by “one large-calibre bullet” which could produce devastating wounds.
Dr Irfan Galaria, a surgeon based in Virginia, slept on the operating room floor of the European hospital between shifts as a volunteer in January. He too saw children badly wounded by highcalibre bullets.
Galaria said that a 14-year-old boy arrived at the hospital who had been shot once through the back. When surgeons operated they found a bullet in the boy’s stomach.
“He was very lucky because it missed a lot of the vital organs but it was just sitting in his abdomen,” he said.
The surgeon took a photo of the bullet, which former IDF soldiers who spoke with the Guardian identified as a powerful .50 calibre round typically fired from a machine gun mounted on an armoured vehicle, although it has also been used in sniper rifles. They said that vehicle-mounted guns often have advanced sighting systems that allow them to target shots but that large numbers of .50 rounds could be fired without precision targeting, making it difficult to establish whether the child was targeted.
Other bullets recovered from young Palestinians include 5.56mm rounds that are standard issue for all IDF infantry rifles but also used by marksmen attached to all infantry units.
Gupta provided the Guardian with CT scans of children with head wounds. These included one of an eight-yearold girl that a pathologist described as showing a “gunshot wound to the head entering right side with bullet in brain (medial right temporal lobe)”.
Although doctors were shocked at the number of child victims, they said they believed the shootings were part of a broader pattern of targeting Palestinian civilians, including elderly people.
“The vast majority of people we saw were not combatants,” said Ahmad. “There was an elderly woman who was on the back of a donkey cart when she was shot. The bullet lodged in her spine and she was paralysed from the waist down and also her lung collapsed. She was somewhere between 60 and 70 years old.”
‘Sniper wounds were common’
Dr Osaid Alser helped organise a group of doctors outside Gaza to give long-distance guidance to the only Palestinian general surgeon remaining at Nasser hospital, who only had limited experience.
“Sniper wounds were common, and quadcopter gunshots as well,” said Alser, who grew up in Gaza City and now lives in Texas.
Doctors said that apparent sniper shots also account for numerous amputations and long-term disabilities, made all the worse in children because a bullet often causes more damage to small bodies.
Alser argued thatit was often possible to distinguish sniper shots.
“When it’s a sniper, usually it’s a bigger bullet, which causes significantly more damage and has more shockwave energy as compared to a smaller rifle or a pistol. If it’s a sniper, it may cause amputation of the limb because it will cause damage to the vascular structure – nerves, bone, soft tissue, everything,” he said.
“Another pattern is injury to the spinal cord when people are shot in the middle of the abdomen or in the middle of the back. Spinal cord injury is not necessarily fatal, unless it’s the neck, but it can be disabling.”
Alser said that one of his elderly relatives, a pioneer of dentistry in Gaza, was among the apparent victims of a sniper.
Dr Mohammed Al Madhoun went missing after seeking medical treatment for a chronic condition at a charity hospital west of Gaza City in December. The 73-year-old’s body was found near the hospital a week later alongside that of his great-nephew. They had both been shot.
“The pattern of injury, and the amount of damage from the bullet, was significant, and that’s mainly caused by a sniper,” said Alser, who reviewed CT scans of the injury. “He was obviously old. You wouldn’t expect a 73-year-old to be a target, right?”
The doctor said the cases he reviewed remotely included other elderly people, among them a woman in her 70s.
“She was shot by a sniper and she had a massive head bleed. That is nonsurvivable. She died a day or two after,” he said.
In October, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, described the IDF as “the most moral army in the world”. The Israeli military claims to be guided by a “purity of arms” doctrine that precludes soldiers from harming “uninvolved civilians”.
But Israeli and international human rights groups have long said that the military’s failure to enforce its own standards – and its willingness to cover up breaches – has contributed to a climate of impunity for soldiers who target civilians.
The groups say it is extremely difficult at this stage to quantify the scale of such shootings in Gaza,not least because their own staff are often displaced and under attack. But Miranda Cleland of Defense for Children International Palestine said that over the years there had been a “clear pattern of Israeli forces targeting Palestinian children with deadly force in situations where the children posed no threat to soldiers”.
“In the occupied West Bank, Israeli soldiers routinely shoot children in the head, chest or abdomen, all areas from which a child will quickly bleed out if they aren’t killed instantly. Many of these children are shot by Israeli forces from great distances, sometimes upwards of 500ft, which is something only a trained military sniper would be capable of,” she said.
An Israeli group, Breaking the Silence, collected testimonies from IDF soldiers in earlier conflicts who said they shot Palestinian civilians merely because they were where they were not supposed to be even though it was evident they were not combatants.
IDF snipers boasted about shooting unarmed Palestinian protesters, including young people, in the knees during nearly two years of demonstrations at the Gaza border fence from the spring of 2018.
One former Israeli army sniper, who did not want to be named, told the Guardian that the IDF’s open-fire regulations were so broad that a soldier has extensive leeway to shoot at anyone once an area is declared a combat zone.
“The problem is the regulations that enable soldiers who just want to shoot Palestinians. In my experience, most soldiers who pull a trigger only want to kill those who should be killed but there are those who regard all the Arabs as the enemy and find any reason to shoot or no reason at all,” he said, adding that a system of impunity protects such soldiers.
“Even if they are outside the regulations, the system will protect them. The army will cover up. The other soldiers in the unit will not object or they will celebrate another dead Arab. There’s no accountability so even the loosest regulations have no real meaning.”
The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has described the IDF’s openfire regulations as “no more than a semblance of legality” in part because they are “repeatedly violated”.
“Other than a handful of cases, usually involving low-ranking soldiers, no one has been put on trial for harming Palestinians,” the group said.
In one of the most notorious cases of soldiers shooting young children in the occupied territories, an army captain fired the entire magazine of his automatic rifle into a 13-year-old Palestinian girl, Iman al-Hams, in 2004 after she crossed into a security zone even though she posed no immediate threat and his own soldiers told him she was “a little girl” who was “scared to death”. The captain was cleared of wrongdoing by a military court.
The Israeli military also has a long history of covering up the killing of children.
After 11-year-old Khalil al-Mughrabi was shot dead as he played football in Rafah in 2001, the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem wrote to the IDF demanding an inquiry.
Months later, the judge advocate general’s office told B’Tselem that Khalil was shot by soldiers who acted with “restraint and control” to disperse a riot in the area. However, the IDF made the mistake of attaching a copy of its secret internal investigation, which said the riot had been much earlier in the day and that soldiers who opened fire on the child were guilty of a “serious deviation from obligatory norms of behaviour”.
The chief military prosecutor, Col Einat Ron, then spelled out alternative false scenarios that should be offered to B’Tselem to cover up the crime.
More recently, the IDF was accused of lying to cover up the shooting of the Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, almost certainly by an Israeli sniper. The military at first blamed the Palestinians and then falsely claimed that Abu Akleh was caught in crossfire during a gun battle. Her employer, Al Jazeera, presented video evidence that there was no firefight and that at least one Israeli soldier was targeting the journalist.
Alvi, the Canadian physician, left Gaza in the third week of February as Israeli forces were threatening a ground assault against Rafah.Alvi founded the US-based charity Humanity Auxilium, which has worked with Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, displaced Syrians and earthquake survivors in Turkey.
“This is not a normal war. The war in Ukraine has killed 500 kids in two years and the war in Gaza has killed over 10,000 in less than five months. We have seen wars before but this is something that is a dark stain on our shared humanity.”
cause temperatures can be hard to forecast. And far more needs to be done to secure water in an uncertain future.
“Climate is what you expect and weather is what you get – and we got some interesting weather this year,” said Jeffrey Mount, a senior fellow at the PPIC Water Policy Center. California’s water system is designed around an average year, he said, with averages helping decision-makers determine adequate regulations, distribution of water rights and reservoir management. “Yet it’s the last kind of year you would expect to have.”
The wet periods are getting wetter and the dry periods drier in California’s already highly variable climate, and some experts were bracing for a swing back to drought following last year’s deluges. Instead, the state was given a gift.
“We came into the season with our reservoirs in good shape, we put a substantial amount of water back in the ground, our demand was low because our soils were so wet, and now we have back-to-back good years,” Mount said. What matters now is what California does with it. Groundwater, an essential part of California’s water supply that provides roughly 40% of water used by farms and communities, has not bounced back after being overdrawn during times of drought. Roughly a third of monitored wells are below normal levels and hundreds of wells are at an all-time low.
But with a strong snowpack and the water flowing readily on the surface, the badly needed reprieve has bought the state more time to make key changes. “It is a chance to have intelligent conversations about the future,” Mount said. “Sometimes the emergency is the great motivator to get things done, but it is nice not to have that distraction.”
The two strong water years come at a time when the state is working on new, more sustainable strategies to better store and distribute water when it is abundant to plan for when the hydrological coin inevitably flips. Mount said it will be crucial for the public and for decision-makers to not lose sight of the next drought.
But there will be disagreements ahead on how to chart the best path forward. During the snowpack announcement, Newsom took a moment to plug his controversial Delta Conveyance Project, a plan that has been in the works for decades, which would use a tunnel to carry water from the Sacramento River and pump flows into the northern end of the California Aqueduct. Diverse coalitions of environmentalists, tribes, fishing groups and state legislators have criticized the plan, but Newsom heralded it as “foundational” and “critical”, calling it “a climate project”.
Two strong water years have offered the space for decision-makers and communities to look closely at options and opportunities. But conditions can change rapidly, especially as the climate crisis turns up the dial. “For the public and the legislature, the biggest challenge is that people lose interest in making the difficult choices that have to be made to plan for and respond to the future,” Mount said. “Every single water manager still wrings their hands every day because 365 days from now we could be having a very different conversation.”