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Tag: justice system
January 6 riot

America's Two-Tiered Justice System -- And Why Trump Is Not Its Victim

It may come as a surprise to hear that I actually agree with Donald Trump on something: America does have a two-tiered system of justice. In fact, you could say I beat him to it since I reached that conclusion long before the former president adopted it as his mantra.

I was not even in grade school when my older brother was arrested. While I didn’t know much about the world, I always thought that you had to do something terrible for law enforcement to haul you away. I also knew my brother Tony. And, though he teased me in the annoying way big brothers do, I valued him not only as a brother and friend, but as a pretty cool dude. So, I knew he couldn’t be the bad guy.

I still remember that night.

My mom and dad, fresh off the joy of a church dance, were confronted with the crisis when they hit the front door, and they scrambled to find the deed to the house in case they needed it to bail their son out (because if my father had anything to say about it, Tony was not going to spend a night in jail).

I was more confused when I discovered his “crime,” sitting down in a diner and ordering a burger.

That was it?

It really was the “system,” I realized, not my brother. Maryland law, at a time not that long ago, allowed business owners to bar Black people from their establishments. What the state did was technically legal — but wrong. I was sure of it.

An unjust law allowed the police whose salary my parents paid with their taxes to handcuff, fingerprint and jail my big brother because people who looked like my family were not included in an oath to “protect and serve.”

It was definitely a two-tiered system of justice, one that folks like my three eldest siblings and civil rights lawyer Juanita Jackson Mitchell — whose expertise brought my brother home — worked to correct with activism and courage, an adjective that definitely does not apply to Trump’s January 6 army of lawbreakers.

That the activists’ job is not done is clear when poor folks and minorities, often represented by overworked public defenders, languish in jails when they haven’t been tried or convicted of anything.

It’s why my solidarity with Trump ends when you dive into the actual details.

No matter how much he tries to align himself with civil rights martyrs or find common cause with Black voters whom he insists feel his pain, the current GOP presidential candidate’s actions and promises reveal a different truth.

Staring down charges in federal and state court, Trump has not spent time in handcuffs or a cell, he has a high-powered team of lawyers to delay and defend, and he has the luxury of raising money for a presidential campaign while complaining about his misfortune, even running on it.

The man who has no problem repeating the word “illegals,” with a heavy dose of dangerous dehumanization — calling those who cross our borders “animals” — reveres and elevates felons who bought into his stolen-election lies and decided to act.

Trump refuses to say “criminals” when referring to the thugs who attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021, while trying to overturn the results of a free and fair presidential election.

On the campaign trail, he is saying that, if elected in November, he will pardon and let loose a bunch of people I surely don’t want running around the streets of my neighborhood or anywhere in this country. Most of their sentences are already below what prosecutors recommended.

According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, as of January of this year, “Approximately 452 defendants have been charged with assaulting, resisting, or impeding officers or employees, including approximately 123 individuals who have been charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily injury to an officer.” About 140 police officers were assaulted. And 718 of those charged have pleaded guilty to a variety of federal charges, including four to federal charges of seditious conspiracy.

One man, sentenced to six years and six months, blindsided a police officer — an Army veteran who had served in Iraq — knocking him off a five-foot ledge. Another was charged this month with firing a gun into the air that day.

Yet, Trump was cheered as he made a mockery of America’s national anthem in an Ohio speech over the weekend, offering a twisted rendition to honor those who did his bidding, calling them “unbelievable patriots.” The man who never served in the military and disparaged those who did finally found an occasion to salute.

Hypocrisy is too mild a word to describe Trump, his adoring crowd and the members of a Republican Party campaigning on “law and order” while agreeing with the boss’ autocratic agenda — or staying silent and looking the other way.

Trump’s supporters, many of them lawmakers who cowered in fear that January day, have gained amnesia and lost a spine since then.

They should be ashamed.

It does make perfect sense that Trump has a soft spot for the criminals who broke down doors and smashed windows, assaulted police and relieved themselves in the pristine halls of my House and yours — they were breaking the law not in the name of an ideal, but on behalf of a man unwilling to loosen his grip on raw power, even after a majority of Americans said “no.”

The societal changes they were fighting for were far from noble, far different than the ideals that drove my brother, who has been vindicated by the moral arc of history.

It’s been a lot of years since my young eyes were opened to the gulf between what America promises and what it delivers. I lost innocence I will never recover when I saw my usually bubbly mother, in party dress and high heels, crying on the night of her son’s first arrest — yes, there was another diner and another arrest before his activist days were done.

I see a system of mass incarceration that outpaces other countries, still tainted by racism and inequities.

Then why am I less cynical and more hopeful about what justice should mean in America than those who have always enjoyed the privileges of resting on that top tier, yet are still outraged, screaming about the unfairness of it all?

Mary C. Curtis has worked at The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Charlotte Observer, as national correspondent for Politics Daily, and is a senior facilitator with The OpEd Project. She is host of the CQ Roll Call "Equal Time with Mary C. Curtis" podcast. Follow her on X @mcurtisnc3.

Reprinted with permission from Roll Call.

America Needs A Justice System Worthy Of The Name

America Needs A Justice System Worthy Of The Name

The United States does not have a justice system.

If we define a justice system as a system designed for the production of justice, then it seems obvious that term cannot reasonably be applied to a system that countenances the mass incarceration by race and class of hundreds of thousands of nonviolent offenders. Any system that vacuums in 1 out of every 3 African-American males while letting a banker who launders money for terrorist-connected organizations, Mexican drug cartels, and Russian mobsters off with a fine is not a justice system.

No, you call that an injustice system.

This is something I’ve been saying for years. Imagine my surprise when, last week, President Obama said it, too. “Any system that allows us to turn a blind eye to hopelessness and despair,” he said in a speech before the NAACP in Philadelphia, “that’s not a justice system, that’s an injustice system.” He called for reforms, including the reduction or elimination of mandatory minimum sentencing and the repeal of laws that bar ex-felons from voting.

This was the day after Obama commuted the sentences of 46 nonviolent drug offenders, and two days before he became the first president to visit a prison, Federal Correctional Institution El Reno, near Oklahoma City. “There but for the grace of God,” he said, minutes after poking his head into an empty 9-by-10 cell that houses three inmates.

It was more than just an acknowledgment of his personal good fortune. Given that Obama, his two immediate predecessors, and such disparate luminaries as Sarah Palin, John Kerry, Newt Gingrich, Al Gore, Jeb Bush, and Rick Santorum are known to have used illicit drugs when they were younger, it was also a tacit acknowledgment that fate takes hairpin turns. And that the veil separating drug offender from productive citizen is thinner than we sometimes like to admit.

Welcome to what may be a transformational moment: the end of an odious era of American jurisprudence. Meaning, the era of mass incarceration.

Apparently, the president has decided to make this a priority of his final 18 months in office. Even better, the call for reform enjoys bipartisan support. Republican senators Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, among others, have embraced the cause. And the very conservative Koch brothers have chosen to “ban the box” (i.e., stop requiring ex-offenders to disclose their prison records to prospective employers on their job applications).

All of which raises the promise that, just maybe, something will actually be done.

It is long past “about time.” Our color-coded, class-conscious, zero-tolerance, punishment-centric, mandatory minimum system of “justice” has made us the largest jailer on earth. One in four of the world’s prisoners is in an American lockup. This insane rate of imprisonment has strained resources and decimated communities.

It has also shattered families and impoverished children, particularly black ones. So many people bewail or condemn the fact that a disproportionate number of black children grow up without fathers, never connecting the dots to the fact that a disproportionate number of black fathers are locked up for the same nonviolent drug offenses for which white fathers routinely go free.

The “get tough on crime” wave that swept over this country in the ’80s and ’90s was born of the unfortunate American penchant for applying simplistic answers to complicated questions. But bumper-sticker solutions have a way of bringing unintended consequences.

We will be dealing with these unintended consequences for generations to come. But perhaps we are finally ready to take steps toward reversing that historic blunder.

And giving America a justice system worthy of the name.

(Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, FL, 33132. Readers may contact him via email at lpitts@miamiherald.com.)

Photo: Tim Evanson via Flickr

Glenn Ford Walks Free, Marty Stroud Never Will

Glenn Ford Walks Free, Marty Stroud Never Will

A few words about the high-priced education of Marty Stroud.

Thirty-one years ago, A.M. “Marty” Stroud III was a prosecutor in Louisiana’s Caddo Parish. He was arrogant, narcissistic, judgmental, and full of himself. This assessment of Stroud’s character, you should know, comes from Stroud himself.

It is contained in a remarkable letter to the editor of the Shreveport Times regarding a 65-year-old black man named Glenn Ford whom Stroud tried for murder in 1984. When the all-white jury sentenced Ford to death, Stroud and his team went out drinking to celebrate. Meantime, Ford went to Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison.

Last year, he was set free. The current district attorney asked a judge to vacate Ford’s conviction and sentence in the wake of evidence that he was, as he had steadfastly maintained for over 30 years, innocent of the robbery and murder of Shreveport businessman Isadore Rozeman. The exact nature of that evidence has not been revealed, but that it is conclusive is attested to in the district attorney’s capitulation.

We do know this much: Officials are now said to believe another man did the killing. In a motion seeking Ford’s release, they say that if the state had known then what it knows now, “Glenn Ford might not even have been arrested or indicted for this offense.” Which seems pretty ironclad.

And yet, incredibly, Louisiana is fighting Ford’s request for compensation for his 30 lost years, a total that amounts to a relatively measly $330,000 under state law. One is reminded of Florida’s equally niggardly 2011 refusal to compensate Derrick Williams after railroading him into spending 18 years behind bars for a rape he didn’t commit.

But even if he wins, Ford is unlikely to ever enjoy the windfall; he has Stage 4 lung cancer — he says it went undiagnosed while he was at Angola — and doctors say he is unlikely to be alive by Thanksgiving. Ford wants to leave any monies he receives to his grandchildren. The state says he should receive nothing because he hasn’t proven himself “factually innocent.”

In a March 8 editorial, the Shreveport Times called that “hogwash.” In his letter, Stroud co-signed that judgment. But he went further.

There is insufficient space here to do justice to what he wrote. But you will find it — along with a remarkable video interview — at shreveporttimes.com. Suffice it to say, the man is eaten alive by remorse. He rebukes himself for multiple sins, for being too “passive” to follow up on evidence suggesting Ford’s innocence, for never considering the unfairness of striking black jurors from the panel that judged an indigent black man, for not caring that Ford was represented by “counsel who had never tried a criminal case, much less a capital one,” for placing “junk science” into evidence, for caring less about justice than about winning.

He apologizes to the jurors, to the court, to the family of the victim, and to Ford “for all the misery I have caused him and his family.”

And Stroud, now a 63-year-old attorney in private practice, also says this: “No one should be given the ability to impose a sentence of death in any criminal proceeding. We are simply incapable of devising a system that can fairly and impartially impose a sentence of death because we are all fallible human beings.”

Some of us consider that a self-evident truth. Yet learning that truth cost Stroud his good opinion of himself and 30 years of another man’s life.

His experience should serve as a warning to those who persist in believing the death penalty is justice. The death penalty, writes Stroud, is “an abomination.” The death penalty is “state-assisted revenge.” He didn’t always feel that way, but he has paid a high price for his education. And he will continue to pay. After all, Glenn Ford eventually walked free.

Marty Stroud never will.

(Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, FL, 33132. Readers may contact him via email at lpitts@miamiherald.com.)

Photo: Ken Piorkowski via Flickr

Court Blocks Mississippi From Closing State’s Last Abortion Clinic

Court Blocks Mississippi From Closing State’s Last Abortion Clinic

By Alana Semuels, Los Angeles Times

NEW ORLEANS — After a series of setbacks, abortion rights advocates claimed a small victory Tuesday after a federal appeals court blocked a law that would have closed the last remaining abortion clinic in Mississippi.

The law required that all physicians associated with an abortion clinic have admitting privileges at a local hospital. The state’s last clinic, Jackson Women’s Health Organization, had filed a suit challenging the law, in part because none of the seven hospitals in the Jackson area were willing to grant the physicians admitting privileges.

Mississippi officials argued that women could go to neighboring states to obtain abortions, but the three-member panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled, 2-1, that the state could not shift its constitutional duties to another state.

The law “imposes an undue burden on a women’s right to choose an abortion,” the court said.

The decision is curious because the same appeals court, with a different panel of judges, let stand a similar law in Texas this year. Similar laws are also being litigated in Wisconsin and Alabama and are in place in Kansas, North Dakota, and Tennessee. Comparable laws will go into effect later this year in Louisiana and Oklahoma.

The difference, said Matthew Steffey, a professor at the Mississippi College School of Law, is that the Mississippi law would have closed the last remaining clinic, whereas the Texas law closed only some.

“If you go all the way back to the era of Roe vs. Wade, the problem was that abortions were available in some jurisdictions but not others,” Steffey said. “Roe nationalized the right of access to abortion, and the court, for very good reason, said a state can’t export or transfer its constitutional duties to other states.”

The state can still appeal the decision, and Jan Schaefer, a spokeswoman for the Mississippi attorney general, said in an email that the state was “reviewing the ruling and considering our options.”

Steffey said the law was likely to remain blocked.

“I think it’s essentially game over at this point,” he said.

The Mississippi law, passed in 2012, was one of a flurry of anti-abortion laws pushed by conservative legislatures after the midterm election of 2010. Some required doctors performing abortions to have admitting privileges in local hospitals, others banned abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy, and others required clinics to give women an ultrasound and then describe the image to them before performing the procedure.

Legislators said the bills were aimed at making abortion safer for women, although many also said they would prefer to eliminate abortion entirely if they could.

“If a woman is going to have an abortion, we want to make sure she receives proper health care,” said Rep. Katrina Jackson, a Democrat, who sponsored Louisiana’s admitting-privileges bill. “It’s about continuity of care.”

Abortion rights advocates have fought many of the state laws in court, with varying degrees of success. In January, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal from Arizona on a state law that barred abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, effectively blocking that law, but similar laws still stand.

The Texas admitting-privileges law still stands, and a paper released last week found that the number of abortion facilities in the state had dropped to 22 from 41 and that the abortion rate had declined 13 percent in the year the law has been in place.

“The courts have been a bit of a mixed bag, and sometimes restrictions are struck down, sometimes they’re not, and it’s very hard to predict what will happen,” said Elizabeth Nash, the state issues manager at the Guttmacher Institute, which advocates for reproductive rights.

In an effort to get a more definitive ruling on the matter, Planned Parenthood has filed a petition asking the full bench of the 5th Circuit to reconsider the Texas case. Its petition would essentially ask all of the judges to rule on the law, rather than just the three-judge panel, which upheld it in March. Differing decisions could make the case proceed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Also Tuesday, the Massachusetts Legislature gave final approval to a bill designed to tighten security around abortion clinics in the state. The law, which would allow police to disperse anyone impeding access and keep them at least 25 feet from the clinic’s entrance for up to eight hours, comes a month after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a 2007 state law that prevented protesters from coming within 35 feet of the entrances. Gov. Deval Patrick has said he will act quickly to sign the bill into law.

In the meantime, clinics such as the Women’s Health Care Center in New Orleans are struggling to gain admitting privileges at local hospitals, since the law in Louisiana still stands. On a recent weekday, Sylvia Cochran, the administrator of the clinic, one of two in the New Orleans area, sat in an office as protesters outside held graphic images of fetuses and shouted at women approaching the building.

The admitting-privileges law is “a game-changer,” said Cochran, who has been working at the clinic since 1977. It goes into effect Sept. 1, and abortion rights advocates say it could close all clinics in the state except for two in Shreveport.

Cochran spent recent months applying for malpractice insurance, which is necessary for gaining admitting privileges, to no avail so far. The state had previously prohibited doctors providing abortions from obtaining malpractice insurance, a law that was overturned by the courts in 2012. No hospital had granted her clinic admitting privileges yet.

If the New Orleans and Baton Rouge clinics close, it will be a shorter drive for New Orleans women to visit the clinic in Jackson, across the state border, than it will be for them to visit the remaining clinics in their own state.

Photo: World Can’t Wait via Flickr

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