THE AMERIKKKAN LEGAL SYSTEM

by David R. Hoffman, Legal Editor of Pravda.Ru

It is a decision that will live in infamy. It rivals Dred Scott, which held that African-Americans had no rights that white people were bound to respect, and Plessy vs. Ferguson, which upheld the segregationist doctrine of “separate but equal.” It, for all intents and purposes, destroyed the landmark ruling in Brown vs. Topeka, which declared that “separate but equal” is “inherently unequal.” It is one of the most racist, shortsighted and destructive legal “opinions” in history. Yet it is hidden behind pretentious platitudes about the Constitution of the United States being “color-blind.”

Still it is not surprising that the current United States Supreme Court wasted little time leaving its imprint of evil upon the nation. After all, this was the court that launched the pestilence known as George W. Bush during the coup of 2000.

The constitution has never been “color-blind.” From the “three-fifths” compromise that, for purposes of Congressional representation, counted a slave as three-fifths of a human being, to the “Hayes Compromise” that made the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments nothing more than empty words on paper, to the current decision to resegregate American schools, and eventually American society, the constitution has always been capable of seeing “color.” To think that a history of racism and injustice can be obliterated with a stroke of a pen demonstrates just how clueless these so-called Supreme Court “justices” really are. Or perhaps it is simply that these “justices,” are on the summit of what is probably the most corrupt and unabashedly racist institution in the nation: Amerikkka’s legal system.

This corruption and racism is often invisible to the layperson, because the system does an excellent job of concealing it. But, as the cases and examples below illustrate, if one is perceptive enough, they can pierce the veil that often masks the injustices inherent in Amerikkka’s legal system.

Perhaps the best paradigm to illustrate the machinations of the legal system resides in the recent disbarment proceedings against Michael Nifong, the disgraced former prosecutor in the now infamous Duke University rape case. While the televised chastisement of Nifong was purportedly designed to restore “faith” in the legal system, his disbarment was the exception, not the norm, when it comes to issues involving prosecutorial misconduct.

Although I only practiced law for a few years, during that brief time I was amazed at the dishonesty and politicization of those individuals supposedly sworn to preserve “law-and-order.” I saw a prosecutor become enraged at a defense attorney who successfully had a conviction overturned because a police officer had intentionally falsified a report; I saw people prosecuted, and oftentimes convicted, not because of a good faith belief in their guilt, but to cover up incidents of police brutality, knowing that a criminal conviction would weaken any civil rights lawsuit a person abused by police might file; I saw old, unfounded charges filed out of spite when a defendant was acquitted of different charges; I saw prosecutors in sparsely populated counties repeatedly prosecute people they viewed as “undesirable,” in an effort to force them to move away; In crimes involving two or more defendants, I saw prosecutors use one theory of how the crime was committed to convict one defendant, then change that theory to convict another; I saw a prosecutor express a belief in the innocence of the man she was prosecuting, then simply respond, “Oh Well,” after he was found guilty and sent to prison; and, perhaps most disturbingly, I saw prosecutors (like Nifong) become even more determined to pursue a prosecution when the facts pointed to a person’s innocence, instead of admitting they made a mistake.

One example of the misconduct that led to Nifong’s disbarment was his failure to turn over the results of DNA tests to defense attorneys. These tests apparently proved that the foreign DNA found on the accuser did not match any of the accused. Yet, ironically, if Nifong had neglected to obtain this DNA evidence in the first place, the courts would have zealously endorsed his negligence.

Don’t believe it? Several years ago, I represented a client who had been charged with shoplifting. When the prosecutor turned over his “discovery” materials to me, I learned that, prior to filing the shoplifting charges, he had in his possession two separate reports indicating that the store had a surveillance tape of the alleged incident. I also learned that he had filed the shoplifting charges without ever bothering to lift up a telephone and request a copy of this tape.

When I called the store to obtain my own copy of the tape, I was informed it had been “accidentally” erased. This was particularly suspicious, since my client advised me that the tape would have shown that he had not exited the store with any unpaid merchandise.

Yet when I filed a motion to dismiss the charges, based on the prosecutor’s failure to obtain and examine this tape prior to filing charges, he successfully argued that since he had never bothered to obtain the tape in the first place, he could not be held responsible for its erasure.

My client was not only convicted, but an appeals court subsequently endorsed the prosecutor’s action (or more correctly lack of action) by condescendingly stating that he had no duty to “procure” the tape. A few years later, this prosecutor was “punished” by being appointed to a lucrative position as a magistrate judge.

So the moral of the story is simple: the shoddier the investigation, the less evidence obtained, the quicker the rush to judgment, the more likely you are to obtain a conviction.

But even thorough investigations do not prevent prosecutorial misconduct. Under the Brady Doctrine, prosecutors are legally required to turn over exculpatory evidence to the defense. The problem is that prosecutors are often free to decide what they consider to be exculpatory, thereby making strategic and evidentiary decisions that should be made by defense attorneys. For every Nifong who gets caught violating Brady, there are hundreds who go unpunished, even after their misconduct and intentional withholding of evidence results in an innocent person spending several years in prison.

I once worked on a case where a courageous police officer wrote a report that directly contradicted the “official” version of how an indigent African-American man was forcibly arrested. This officer stated that both the arrest and use of force were unjustified, and that the man deserved an apology. Not surprisingly, this report was never turned over to the defense. Fortunately it was leaked to the news media.

In response to the resulting news reports, the police department subjected several officers to polygraph tests, not to investigate the allegations of excessive force and false arrest, but to discover who leaked the report. In addition, despite this report, the prosecutor still insisted upon taking this man to trial. Even after he was acquitted the prosecutor’s office, in a final display of vindictiveness, tried to force him to pay for the costs of deposing the police officer whose honesty had secured his acquittal.

Many conservative pundits have opined that the extensive media coverage devoted to the Duke rape case is evidence of a “liberal” media, since the case involved allegations that three wealthy, white, privileged college students raped a “working class” African-American woman. These pundits quickly point out that similar attention was not given to a case in Tennessee where several African-American men raped and murdered a white university student and her boyfriend.

Such an argument is not only disingenuous; it also ignores the inherent racism in both the legal system and in American society. After all, as one commentator on Court TV pointed out, Nifong was disbarred for wrongfully accusing wealthy white men. Rarely, if ever, are prosecutors punished for wrongfully accusing African-American or Hispanic defendants.

As I argued in a past Pravda.Ru article, entitled The Ideal Paradigm (November 10, 2003), to be a crime victim worthy of national media attention a person usually has to be white, young, female and physically attractive. The ordeals of Elizabeth Smart, Natalee Holloway, Laci Peterson, Lana Clarkson, and Nicole Simpson inundated the airwaves for weeks. Even JonBenet Ramsey was referred to as a “beauty queen.” Yet when an African-American girl escaped from her abductors by chewing through the duct tape binding her wrists, the biggest “news” item was when two “shock” jocks ridiculed her abduction and escape on the radio.

Although the unpunished injustices perpetrated against African-Americans by those in Amerikkka’s legal system would fill volumes, I will list a few here.

There was the case of Richard Alexander, an African-American man from South Bend, Indiana, who was convicted of being the “River Park” rapist. After his alleged victims described their attacker as a “muscular black man,” Alexander was put into a line-up wearing a skin-tight T-shirt, while others in the same line-up wore loose fitting overalls. The rapes continued while he was in jail awaiting trial, and after the prosecutors discovered that the physical evidence did not match him, they simply tried him for the rapes where no physical evidence existed, relying exclusively on the testimony of the victims. When a mixed race jury failed to convict him, Alexander was retried and convicted by an all-white jury. After serving five years in prison, it was discovered he had been wrongfully convicted.

How were the prosecutors punished for this wrongful conviction? The Chief Prosecutor was appointed to a prestigious judgeship on an appeals court, and the prosecutor who actually tried the case was selected to be Chief Judge in the county.

As for Alexander, a federal magistrate ruled that he was not entitled to any financial compensation for his years of wrongful imprisonment, because he could not prove his conviction was obtained “in bad faith.”

The State of Indiana also had its high profile rape case when former heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson went on trial in Indianapolis. While Tyson’s volatile personality brought him little sympathy, questions about the integrity of his trial persist.

In Indiana, at the time of Tyson’s trial, prosecutors were allowed to handpick the judges they wanted. Not surprisingly, Tyson’s prosecutors picked a judge who had been a prosecutor herself, specializing in sex crimes. She quickly made several evidentiary rulings excluding certain information from the jury. Several jurors, after learning about the nature of this evidence, stated that had they known about it during the trial, they would never have voted to convict Tyson.

Yet this judge, in a vain effort to prove that hers was not a “kangaroo court,” repeatedly brought Tyson before her to “apologize” in exchange for an early release, which is usually a clear indication that the system is attempting to cover an injustice by extorting a person into admitting to something they didn’t do.

As for the other parties, the lead prosecutor went on to be a highly sought after “legal expert” on news programs, and the alleged victim was guaranteed a monetary settlement, because Indiana prohibits people from arguing their innocence in civil trials when they have already been convicted in criminal court.

Just north of Indiana is the “sanctimonious” State of Michigan— “sanctimonious” because its alleged concern over the “dignity of life” compelled prosecutors to try and convict Dr. Jack Kevorkian for his role in an assisted suicide.

Ironically, Kevorkian could have remained free and still assisted a suicide by simply arranging for his client to enter the Michigan “correctional” system. A federal judge recently called this system a “de facto death penalty” because of its “callous and dysfunctional” failure to treat “life-threatening illness.”

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.”