The Amerikkkan legal system. Part II

03.07.2007 Source: URL:
http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/94442-legal_system-0

Continued. Read Part I of the article here

Tragically, this judge's observation came too late to save an unjustly
imprisoned man named Maurice Carter. An African-American from Gary, Indiana,
Carter had the misfortune of visiting Berrien County, Michigan around the
same time a white, off-duty police officer from the City of Benton Harbor
was shot and wounded. Benton Harbor is an island of minorities, primarily
African-Americans, most of whom live in poverty just a few miles away from
the multi-million dollar mansions lining Lake Michigan's shoreline.

A drug dealer, seeking a reduced sentence, told police a few years
after the shooting that Carter had been involved. Though this dealer later
recanted and was convicted of perjury, Carter still went to trial in front
of an all-white jury. Even though an African-American woman, who observed
the shooter for several minutes when he patronized a local store, had
testified the shooter was not Carter, the jury chose instead to believe
white witnesses whose "identification" was based on fleeting glimpses of the
perpetrator running from the scene.

Because he maintained his innocence, Carter was consistently denied
parole. Finally, dying of a liver disease brought on by the lack of adequate
medical treatment, attorneys petitioned for his release.

Despite having served more time for his alleged crime than most guilty
people, a prosecutor still argued that the dying Carter should remain in
prison, while the judge hearing the petition joked about the severity of
Carter's illness. When a reporter asked the prosecutor why, as a person, she
couldn't support Carter's release, she replied, "I didn't come here as a
person."

Eventually Michigan's governor commuted Carter's sentence, but his
conviction remained on record. He enjoyed only three brief months of freedom
before dying from the disease the State so concerned about the "sanctity of
life" had given him.

To show how easily the young men in the Duke rape case could have been
convicted, particularly if they were African-Americans, one need only look
at the tragic case of James Waller. Waller served ten years in prison for
sexually assaulting a young boy. The "evidence" against him was his
misfortune to be the only African-American living in the same apartment
complex as the boy, and his even greater misfortune of shopping in the same
convenience store as the victim, who, upon hearing Waller's voice, suddenly
"recognized" him as his attacker. Waller recently became the twelfth person
exonerated through DNA evidence in Dallas County, Texas.

Of course such a scenario is not unique in Dallas County. Prosecutors
in this county were once instructed about how to "legally" keep
African-Americans off of juries, and there have been more exonerations
because of wrongful convictions (thirteen) in this county than have been
experienced by entire states. Not surprisingly, this county resides in the
same state where former governor George W. Bush originally exposed his
bloodlust and lack of concern for justice by arrogantly proclaiming "no
innocent person had been executed under [his] watch."

Before continuing this article, it is important to stress that it is
not meant to be a polemic about what legal elements need to be present in
sexual assault cases, but simply an illustration of how ironic it is that
Mike Nifong may have avoided disbarment if he had not tested the DNA
evidence, and/or if the accused were African-American and poor.

But why do those responsible for the preservation of "law and order"
permit such injustices to occur? The answer is simple: BECAUSE THEY CAN. The
Amerikkkan legal system is designed to protect its own.

This is why a sleeping Fred Hampton, leader of the Chicago area Black
Panther Party in the late 1960s, could be extralegally executed by police
during a raid on his apartment. This is why former Chicago Police commander
Jon Burge has never faced charges, and continues to draw a police pension,
even though he oversaw the use of torture that sent several innocent men,
primarily minorities, to death row. This is why, in the same region, a
"good-old-boy" jury acquitted prosecutors and police officers who had used
perjured testimony to send two innocent Hispanic men, Rolando Cruz and
Alejandro Hernandez, to Illinois' death row. But the jury was not satisfied
with simply acquitting the defendants; they partied with them afterwards, as
if conspiracy to commit murder was something to celebrate.

This is why authorities knew they could deny Black Panther Dhoruba Bin
Wahad's request for legal documents during his years of wrongful
imprisonment, simply by telling him such documents "did not exist." This is
why telephone records proving that former Panther Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt was
innocent of the crime he was convicted of "mysteriously disappeared." This
is also why the prosecution in Pratt's case did not hesitate to use the
perjured testimony of an informant. And this is why the courts keep American
Indian Movement (AIM) activist Leonard Peltier imprisoned, despite evidence
that crucial documents were withheld from the defense.

Some have argued that the solution would be to have more minorities
working in the legal system. Yet such people, once in the system, are often
more detrimental to members of their own race than white prosecutors and
judges.

A conservative newspaper in Berrien County made this argument in the
Maurice Carter case by proclaiming that several of the officers responsible
for Carter's conviction were African-American. What this paper failed to
acknowledge, however, is when minorities become involved in the law
enforcement/legal system, they often are more concerned about pleasing and
appeasing the white power structure than focusing on truth and justice.

I have seen cases where African-American attorneys accepted money from
white prosecutors simply to sit by their side when there was an
African-American defendant or the prospect of a mixed race jury. Yet rarely,
if ever, did these attorneys bother to learn the facts of the case, even
though their presence exponentially enhanced the chances of an innocent
African-American going to prison.

Some of the police officers involved in the Fred Hampton and Mark
Clark murders were African-American; Thurbert Baker, the State of Georgia's
Attorney General, is African-American, and he persists in keeping a
seventeen-year-old African-American man in prison for having consensual sex
with a fifteen-year-old girl, despite a judge's ruling that the young man be
released.

But even more vile is the self-loathing antics of the Supreme Court's
lone African-American member, Clarence Thomas. Now that Thomas has "gotten
his" through programs designed to remedy racial discrimination, he has
persistently and callously joined with his racist colleagues in destroying
these opportunities for others.

Meanwhile Condoleezza Rice spews platitudes about human rights and
democracy in oil-rich Iraq, while the very racists she works for turn a
blind eye to the genocide of impoverished Africans in Darfur. And the
Attorney General of the United States, Alberto Gonzales, has repeatedly
demonstrated that he is little more than a lying, torture endorsing, civil
liberties hating thug who is more concerned with his selfish grip on power
than the good of the nation.

So don't be deceived by the Supreme Court's disingenuous talk of a
constitution that is "color-blind." Its interpretation of that constitution
has resulted in a legal system that exploits racism at every turn, be it
through the disproportionate incarceration of African-Americans, the racial
make-up of juries, prosecutorial decisions about whether to file criminal
charges, and the severity of those charges filed. A white person's
misdemeanor is often an African-American's felony, even though the fact
patterns are identical.

Today there are people of all races cheering the overturning of Brown,
alleging it will restore "neighborhood" schools and a sense of community.
But the Supreme Court has also ruled there is no constitutional right to an
education, and therefore no right for school districts to demand equal
funding. When poorer school districts eventually discover that this ruling
will make them incapable of purchasing the resources and materials enjoyed
by schools in wealthier neighborhoods, will they still be cheering the de
facto segregation endorsed by four wealthy white men and a self-loathing
African-American whose black robes conceal the white robes and pointed hats
they should really be wearing? If and when this cheering stops, will America
be able to undo the damage these so-called "justices" have done?

The overturning of Brown will serve as an enduring reminder of the
evils foisted upon America by the Bush dictatorship. This dictatorship
divided the nation, and undermined democracy, by stealing two elections. It
divided the nation again with its lies about the war against Iraq. But it is
its impact on the United States Supreme Court that gives this dictatorship
the power to make evil and divisiveness a permanent fixture throughout the
land, and it has done so by setting America back upon the pathway of once
again becoming "separate and unequal."

David R. Hoffman, Legal Editor of Pravda.Ru