Dear ones,
It’s been another exhausting pandemic week. I’m leaving you to follow the national political crisis on your own for a bit so that we can turn our attention to other matters.
Our theme for today is long-awaited justice. It is often said that justice delayed is justice denied, AND it is also the case that late is better than never. Eddie Lee Howard, now 67, maintained his innocence for the duration of his 26 years on death row for a murder he didn’t commit. The state of Mississippi convicted him on the basis of bite marks on the murder victim. He was finally released last month from a high-security facility located in the Mississippi Delta, and last week, his case was finally dismissed. Howard’s lawyer, Chris Fabricant, who works with the Innocence Project, explained the nature and scope of the injustice:
“It’s a story about junk science, but it’s really about the American criminal justice system,” he said. “It’s a racist, biased prosecution based on a story about a vulnerable, elderly white person being attacked by a Black man, who was convicted with zero due process and sent to a former slave plantation to wait to be executed.”
Howard currently works in a restaurant kitchen and appreciates the pleasures of ordinary life, such as “fresh sheets, warm baths.” Howard is one of “at least 26 people in the US who have been wrongfully convicted on the basis of bite-mark evidence.”
Support the work of the Innocence Project.
Yesterday, New York State Attorney General Letitia James brought a suit against the NYPD because of the “widespread abuses” of protesters who participated in street demonstrations against police brutality in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis. Many of us witnessed the kettling and beating of protesters and the failure of the Mayor or the leadership of the NYPD to prevent this behavior, which continued through a long season of protesting. Among the goals of the suit are
a federal monitor to oversee the department’s policing tactics at future protests, and a court order to declare that the policies and practices the department used during the protests last year were unlawful.
The vastly different treatment of Black protesters and predominantly white right-wing protesters is not news, but The Guardian just published their analysis of new statistics from a research database created at Princeton in 2020 and a non-profit called the US Crisis Monitor:
Law enforcement officers were about 3.5 times more likely to use force against leftwing protests than rightwing protests, with about 1.8% of peaceful leftwing protests and only half a percent of peaceful rightwing protests met with teargas, rubber bullets or other force from law enforcement.
American law enforcement agencies made arrests or other interventions in 9% of the 10,863 Black Lives Matter and other leftwing protests between 1 April 2020 and 8 January, compared with only 4% of the 2,295 rightwing protests.
Half of the time police made any intervention into a leftwing protest, it involved using violent force, ACLED [the project of US Crisis Monitor] found, compared with only about a third of the time for rightwing protests.
Those numbers sound low to me, but I know that anecdotal evidence needs the context of statistical analysis. At the same time, the numbers do not tell the whole story.
Listen to Joy Reid’s description and analysis of the disparities in policing.
And finally, former deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein denounced the Administration’s family-separation policy. Again, we didn’t need Rosenstein or the newly-released report from the Office of Inspector General to tell us that this policy was wrong. But acknowledging the truth is a necessary step toward accountability and transformation.
“We concluded that the Department’s single-minded focus on increasing immigration prosecutions came at the expense of careful and appropriate consideration of the impact of family unit prosecutions and child separations,” the report said.
The OIG said justice department leadership “did not effectively coordinate” with the relevant agencies before implementing zero-tolerance, despite being aware of the challenges created by increasing prosecutions of adult asylum seekers under the policy.
In a conference call in May 2018, [former AG] Sessions told prosecutors: “We need to take away children,” according to notes taken by people on the call and provided to the OIG.
Last summer, it became obvious that the Department of Homeland Security had no mechanism for tracking the location of children. The family separation policy has been widely regarded by legal experts, doctors, and ordinary humans as torture. It is late to finally acknowledge that this is wrong, but it is a beginning. This is one more enormous crisis that the Biden Administration will have to address, as many families have yet to be reunited.
I’ll be back on Monday because the best way to honor the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is by working for justice. Have a good weekend and get some rest.
with love,
L