Issue Position: Civil Rights/Activism

Issue Position

Perhaps it's in his blood, as a distant cousin of the legendary labor leader and first Prime Minister of Jamaica, Sir Alexander Bustamante, but Assemblyman Nick Perry has distinguished himself as a voice of the oppressed.

He has marched countless times against police brutality, visited Haiti in attempts to shed light on the human rights violation in that nation, and introduced and passed scores of bills to protect the basic rights of all New Yorkers.

In 2005 Assemblyman Perry became the first New York Legislator to introduce a bill calling for an aggressive initiative to divest the massive public-employee pension fund from companies doing business with Sudan in protest of the ongoing genocide in the Darfur region of the African nation. The bill calls upon the state comptroller to remove all invested state employee benefit funds from businesses in, or associated, with Sudan. In 2009, Assemblyman Perry passed into law, a landmark bill that ended the barbaric practice of shackling female prisoners during childbirth in New YorkState.

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