“A Nation Of Cultural Illiterates”: What’s Next In Ferguson? Let’s Try A Little Education
What next?
That’s what should concern us now. When the nightly dance of angry protesters, opportunistic criminals, and inept police clashing over the shooting of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown finally ends, what steps should civic-minded people take to address the ongoing abuse of African-Americans by the criminal injustice system? Not just in Ferguson, Missouri, but in America?
There will be no shortage of good ideas: dashboard cameras, community policing, the hiring of more black cops, the removal of military hardware from police arsenals, sensitivity training. To these, I would add a suggestion that is admittedly less “sexy” than any of those, but which I think has greater potential to make fundamental change in the long term. In a word: education.
Beginning as early as the latter elementary years, schools should offer — no, require — age-appropriate cross-cultural studies that would, in effect, introduce us to us. Meaning not some airy-fairy curriculum of achievements and accomplishments designed to impart some vague intra-cultural pride, but a hard-headed, warts and all American history designed to impart understanding of who we are, where we’re from and the forces that have made us — inner-city black, Appalachian white, barrio Mexican, whatever.
You might consider this a utopian idea. Maybe it is. But I’ve never been able to shake a conviction that if you walk the proverbial mile in another man’s shoes, you inoculate yourself against your biases toward him. I believe empathy follows understanding.
Surely we could use some empathy just now. As America races toward a future in which no one race is numerically dominant, it remains largely a nation of cultural illiterates content to interpret various Others through lenses of stereotype and canard. If this has been a bonanza for certain politicians (“Elect me and I’ll keep you safe from the gays/the Mexicans/the blacks!”), let us never forget that this ignorance, these unconscious biases for and against, have real-world impact.
Michael Brown lying dead in the street is seemingly one image thereof. Here’s another:
Last Thursday at 2:30 in the morning, seven teenagers, ages 18 and 19, broke into the home of basketball star Ray Allen. Allen, who played last season for the Miami Heat, was not home, but his wife was. Waking to find strangers in her bedroom, she screamed and they ran.
Police say the teenagers, who had been at a party at a house near Allen’s in the tony South Florida suburb of Coral Gables, didn’t think anybody was home and simply wanted to see what it looked like inside. The kids were questioned and released. Authorities have thus far declined to prosecute, saying — incredibly — that under Florida law, there was no crime with which the group could be charged.
It ought not surprise you to learn that these kids were white Hispanics. And I challenge you — I double-dog dare you — to tell me seven black kids who invaded a home in a wealthy neighborhood in the middle of the night would have likewise gotten off with a good talking-to. Black kids are strangers to such lavish benefit of the doubt.
And we have been too sanguine for too long about such inequality of treatment in a nation whose birth certificate says, “all men are created equal.” We have only the one country. And we can either tear it apart or figure out a way we can all live in it in justice and thus, in peace.
To do that, we must stop being moral cowards, stop embracing the idea that somehow, our racial and cultural challenges will resolve themselves if we just don’t talk about them. Ignore it and it will go away. Take a good look at the carnage in Ferguson and ask yourself:
How’s that working out so far?
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist, The Miami Herald; The National Memo, August 20, 2014
“A Nation Divided, With Liberty And Justice For Some”: White-Collar Crimes Are Not Considered “Appropriate For Jail”
It swallowed people up.
That’s what it really did, if you want to know the truth. It swallowed them up whole, swallowed them up by the millions.
In the process, it hollowed out communities, broke families, stranded hope. Politicians brayed that they were being “tough on crime” — as if anyone is really in favor of crime — as they imposed ever longer and more inflexible sentences for nonviolent drug offenses. But the “War on Drugs” didn’t hurt drugs at all: Usage rose by 2,800 percent — that’s not a typo — in the 40 years after it began in 1971. The “War” also made America the biggest jailer on Earth and drained a trillion dollars — still not a typo — from the Treasury.
Faced with that stunning record of costly failure, a growing coalition of observers has been demanding the obvious remedy. End the War. The Obama administration has been unwilling to go quite that far, but apparently, it is about to do the next best thing: Declare a ceasefire and send the prisoners home.
Attorney General Eric Holder announced last week that the government is embarking upon an aggressive campaign to extend clemency to drug offenders. Those whose crimes were nonviolent, who have no ties to gangs or large drug rings and who have behaved themselves while incarcerated will be invited to apply for executive lenience to cut their sentences short.
Nobody knows yet how many men and women that will be. Easily thousands.
Combined with last year’s announcement that the government would no longer seek harsh mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenders, this may prove the most transformative legacy of Barack Obama’s presidency, excluding the Affordable Care Act. It is a long overdue reform.
But it is not enough.
As journalist Matt Taibbi observes in his new book The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap, Holder’s Justice Department has declined, essentially as a matter of policy, to prosecute the bankers who committed fraud, laundered money for drug cartels and terrorists, stole billions from their own banks, left taxpayers holding the bag, and also — not incidentally — nearly wrecked the U.S. economy. But let some nobody get caught with a joint in his pocket during a stop-and-frisk and the full weight of American justice falls on him like a safe from a 10th-story window.
For instance, a man named Scott Walker is 15 years into a sentence of life without parole on his first felony conviction for selling drugs. Meantime, thug bankers in gangs with names like Lehman Brothers and HSBC commit greater crimes, yet do zero time.
We have, Taibbi argues, evolved a two-track system under which crimes committed while wearing suit and tie — or pumps — are no longer considered jailable offenses. Taibbi said recently on The Daily Show that prosecutors have actually told him they no longer go after white-collar criminals because such people are not considered “appropriate for jail.”
Who is “appropriate”? Do you even have to ask?
Black people. Brown people. Poor people of whatever hue.
Thousands of whom are apparently coming home now. One hopes there will be a mobilization — government agencies, families, churches, civic groups — to help them assimilate into life on the outside. But one also hopes we the people demand reform of the hypocritical system that put them inside to begin with.
These men and women are being freed from insane sentences that should never have been imposed, much less served. Contrary to the pledge we learned in school, it turns out we are actually one nation divided, with liberty and justice for some.
So yes, it is good to see the attorney general dismantle the War on Drugs. But while he’s at it, let him dismantle the War on Fairness, too.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist for The Miami Herald; Published in The National Memo, April 28, 2014
“Affluenza”: The Latest Criminal Defense For The Spoiled Rich
There’s a tired and persistent canard that criminals end up going without punishment for their violations because they convince lawyers and judges that they were so victimized as children by poverty or abuse that they can’t possibly be held accountable for their own behavior. This is hardly the case; in fact, the opposite is true. Indigent defendants have little recourse if they are assigned substandard public representation, and juries hardly identify with a poor kid or a black kid thought to be up to no good. That was represented pretty clearly in the acquittal of George Zimmerman (“George,” one juror referred to the defendant after that trial, as though he were a pal and neighbor). Zimmerman had shot and killed an unarmed African-American teenager, but the jury appeared to identify with the shooter more.
And one look at the appalling result of mandatory-minimum laws shows that drug offenders, in particular, are being subject to absurdly long prison sentences. A first-time offender found with 5 grams of crack can be subject to a minimum five-year sentence; add on some trumped up “conspiracy” as part of the continuum of drug sales, and the incarceration could jump to a mandatory minimum of 20 years. Jack Carpenter sold medical marijuana to dispensaries in California (where it is legal), but was still sentenced to 10 years behind bars by a federal judge.
Forget about avoiding prison because you had it tough as a kid. And don’t even try the “Twinkie defense,” the contention that you were so amped up on sugar you couldn’t control yourself. A Texas teen has taken miscarriage of justice one further, avoiding punishment for killing four people because of what his lawyer called “affluenza.” In other words, the 16-year-old Ethan Couch is such a spoiled brat because his rich parents never bothered to put any limits on him. Therefore, it was argued, even though his blood alcohol was three times the legal limit when he drove his truck 70 mph in a 40-mph zone – killing four people and seriously injuring two more – how could we possibly expect him to have done otherwise? He was never properly parented by his wealthy family, and so how could he be expected to know right from wrong?
The argument sounds like something out of a TV legal drama, added in to display the occasional absurdities of the legal system, especially in cases where the defense attorney is desperate and has absolutely nothing else to argue. But horrifyingly, in this case, it worked.
Couch was sentenced to probation. So much for a 24-year old woman whose car had broken down on the side of the road, along with the mother and daughter who came to help. And so much, too, for the pastor who also stopped to help the stranded motorist. They’re all dead. And two of Couch’s passengers are seriously injured; one of them, also a teen, is now paralyzed. Couch earlier this month pleaded guilty to four counts of intoxication manslaughter and two counts of intoxication assault causing serious bodily injury.
Before sentencing, a defense-provided psychologist, G. Dick Miller, said Couch would not benefit from jail, but rather from therapy. “This kid has been in a system that’s sick. If he goes to jail, that’s just another sick system.”
There’s a sickness to the system here. And it won’t be solved by the $450,000-a-year rehab center Couch will be attending, courtesy of his parents. And he’s learned his lesson anyway – that the rich don’t live like you and me. They aren’t held to the same standards of personal accountability, either.
By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, December 16, 2013
“Mandatory Ineffectiveness”: Mandatory Minimum Prison Sentences Don’t Make Us Safer
There are many reasons to oppose mandatory minimum sentencing laws. They frequently require excessive punishments, they put too much power into the hands of prosecutors (at the expense of judges), and they are expensive. Defenders of such laws say they’re worth it because they keep society safe. They argue that crime rates drop whenever mandatory sentences are enacted and rise when they are repealed or reduced. But after 30 years of experience with mandatory sentences at the federal and state level, we know that’s not true.
Congress passed strict mandatory sentences for buying and selling cocaine, marijuana, heroin and other drugs in 1986. Selling even small amounts of these drugs resulted in automatic five-year prison sentences (10 years for higher quantities). Beginning in 1987, when the new mandatory sentencing law took effect, the violent crime rate actually rose over the next four years by a startling 24 percent and did not return to its 1987 level until a decade later.
Before it reached that point, however, Congress acknowledged that the new mandatory minimum prison sentences were sometimes excessive, and in 1994 voted to exempt certain first-time, nonviolent and low-level drug offenders from mandatory minimums. In those cases, courts were authorized to impose individualized sentences based on the defenders’ role in the crime.
So crime went up, right? Not even close. Since the mandatory minimum carve-out, known as the “safety valve,” was implemented, roughly 80,000 drug offenders have received shorter sentences, and the crime rate has dropped by 44 percent. Needless to say, a theory that says mandatory sentences reduce crime cannot explain how the crime rate dropped so far and so fast when tens of thousands of drug offenders were spared the full weight of such sentences.
The experience of the states is even more devastating to mandatory sentencing’s defenders. Over the past decade, 17 states took steps to reduce their prison populations, including by repealing or curtailing their mandatory sentencing laws. In all 17 states, prison populations fell, and so did their crime rates.
What we have learned is that, while punishment is important, mandatory prison sentences for everyone who breaks the law don’t make us safer. University of Chicago economist and “Freakonomics” author Steven Levitt was perhaps the most influential supporter of pro-prison policies in the ’90s. He said that sending more people to prison was responsible for as much as 25 percent of the decade’s crime drop. Proponents of mandatory sentences cited Levitt at every turn.
But recently, Levitt concluded that as the crime rate continued to drop and the prison population continued to grow, the increase in public safety diminished. He told The New York Times earlier this year, “In the mid-1990s I concluded that the social benefits approximately equaled the costs of incarceration.” But today, Levitt says, “I think we should be shrinking the prison population by at least one-third.” No one in Congress is proposing anything that radical. But reducing our nation’s prison population and crime rate are achievable goals.
Next month, the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on a bipartisan bill introduced by Sens. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., which would give federal courts more discretion to depart from ill-fitting mandatory minimum sentences. The bill, the Justice Safety Valve Act of 2013, would build on the success of the 1994 legislation. Thirty years of evidence suggests this approach will make us safer.
By: Julie Stewart, U. S. News and World Report, September 2, 2013
“A Shameful State Of Affairs”: Defendants’ Legal Rights Undermined By Budget Cuts
Fifty years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously held that everyone who is charged with a serious crime has the right to an attorney. In Gideon v. Wainwright, Justice Hugo Black observed for the court that “in our adversary system, any person haled into court, who is too poor to hire a lawyer, cannot be assured of a fair trial unless counsel is provided to him.” As a prosecutor, as a judge and as our nation’s attorney general, I have seen this reality firsthand.
Despite the promise of the court’s ruling in Gideon, however, the U.S. indigent defense systems — which provide representation to those who cannot afford it — are in financial crisis, plagued by crushing caseloads and insufficient resources. And this year’s forced budget reductions, due largely to sequestration, are further undermining this critical work.
In stark contrast to many state defender programs, the federal public defender system has consistently served as a model for efficiency and success. According to court statistics, as many as 90 percent of federal defendants qualify for court-appointed counsel, and the majority of criminal cases prosecuted by the Justice Department involve defendants represented by well-qualified, hardworking attorneys from federal defender offices. Yet draconian cuts have forced layoffs, furloughs (averaging 15 days per staff member) and personnel reductions through attrition. Across the country, these cuts threaten the integrity of our criminal justice system and impede the ability of our dedicated professionals to ensure due process, provide fair outcomes and guarantee the constitutionally protected rights of every criminal defendant.
I join with those judges, public defenders, legal scholars and countless other criminal justice professionals who have urged Congress to restore these resources, to provide needed funding for the federal public defender program and to fulfill the fundamental promise of our criminal justice system.
The Justice Department is strongly committed to supporting indigent defense efforts through an office known as the Access to Justice Initiative, which I launched in 2010, and a range of grant programs. The department took this commitment to a new level on Aug. 14 by filing a statement of interest in the case of Wilbur v. City of Mt. Vernon — asserting that the federal government has a strong interest in ensuring that all jurisdictions are fulfilling their obligations under Gideon and endorsing limits on the caseloads of public defenders so they can provide quality representation to each client.
Unfortunately the federal public defender program is in dire straits. As I write, federal defenders representing the Boston Marathon bombing suspect are facing about three weeks of unpaid leave. In Ohio, the director of one federal defender office who had served there for nearly two decades has laid himself off rather than terminate several more junior attorneys.
This shameful state of affairs is unworthy of our great nation, its proud history and our finest legal traditions. In purely fiscal terms, the cuts imposed by sequestration defy common sense because they will end up costing taxpayers much more than they save. The right to counsel is guaranteed under the Constitution. On the federal level, this means that every defendant who is unable to afford a lawyer must be represented by either a federal public defender or an appointed attorney from a panel of private lawyers. While federal defender offices are staffed by experienced, dedicated professionals operating in a framework that has proved both effective and efficient, panel attorneys often possess less experience and incur significantly higher fees. An increased reliance on panel attorneys may result in less desirable outcomes as well as significantly higher costs.
Five decades after the Supreme Court affirmed that adequate legal representation is a basic right, sequestration is undermining our ability to realize this fundamental promise. The moral and societal costs of inadequate representation are too great to measure. Only Congress has the ability to restore the funding that federal defenders need to ensure that justice can be done. It is past time for our elected representatives to act.
By: Eric Holder, Jr., Attorney General Of The United States, The Washington Post, August 22, 2013
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