I just spent my day with a woman who was coerced into taking a plea on a crime she didn't commit or they would nail her to the wall for the one she actually did. She just did a little over two years for it. Her prosecutor clearly just wanted a moment of fame bragging about her conviction; true guilt or innocence seem to be irrelevant to those people, and I think it's high time we crash this system as well. People are losing their lives as it is anyway - we might as well do this strategically and take the real bad guys down with us when we go...the following excerpt from Alexander's essay sums up my feelings on this quite well:
"People should understand
that simply exercising their rights would shake the foundations of our
justice system which works only so long as we accept its terms. As you
know, another brutal system of racial and social control once prevailed
in this country, and it never would have ended if some people weren’t
willing to risk their lives. It would be nice if reasoned argument would
do, but as we’ve seen that’s just not the case. So maybe, just maybe,
if we truly want to end this system, some of us will have to risk our
lives.”
Resistance Alley, Phoenix
June Artwalk 2011
-------------from the NEW YORK TIMES -------------
GO TO TRIAL: CRASH THE JUSTICE SYSTEM (Opinion)
By MICHELLE ALEXANDER
March 10, 2012
AFTER years as a civil rights lawyer, I rarely find myself speechless. But some questions a woman I know posed during a phone conversation one recent evening gave me pause:
“What would happen if we organized thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of people charged with crimes to refuse to play the game, to refuse to plea out? What if they all insisted on their Sixth Amendment right to trial? Couldn’t we bring the whole system to a halt just like that?”
The woman was Susan Burton, who knows a lot about being processed through the criminal justice system.
Her odyssey began when a Los Angeles police cruiser ran over and killed her 5-year-old son. Consumed with grief and without access to therapy or antidepressant medications, Susan became addicted to crack cocaine. She lived in an impoverished black community under siege in the “war on drugs,” and it was but a matter of time before she was arrested and offered the first of many plea deals that left her behind bars for a series of drug-related offenses. Every time she was released, she found herself trapped in an under-caste, subject to legal discrimination in employment and housing.
Fifteen years after her first arrest, Susan was finally admitted to a
private drug treatment facility and given a job. After she was clean she
dedicated her life to making sure no other woman would suffer what she
had been through. Susan now runs five safe homes for formerly
incarcerated women in Los Angeles. Her organization, A New Way of Life,
supplies a lifeline for women released from prison. But it does much
more: it is also helping to start a movement. With groups like All of Us
or None, it is organizing formerly incarcerated people and encouraging
them to demand restoration of their basic civil and human rights.
I was stunned by Susan’s question about plea bargains because she — of
all people — knows the risks involved in forcing prosecutors to make
cases against people who have been charged with crimes. Could she be
serious about organizing people, on a large scale, to refuse to
plea-bargain when charged with a crime?
“Yes, I’m serious,” she flatly replied.
I launched, predictably, into a lecture about what prosecutors would do
to people if they actually tried to stand up for their rights. The Bill
of Rights guarantees the accused basic safeguards, including the right
to be informed of charges against them, to an impartial, fair and speedy
jury trial, to cross-examine witnesses and to the assistance of
counsel.
But in this era of mass incarceration — when our nation’s prison
population has quintupled in a few decades partly as a result of the war
on drugs and the “get tough” movement — these rights are, for the
overwhelming majority of people hauled into courtrooms across America,
theoretical. More than 90 percent of criminal cases are never tried
before a jury. Most people charged with crimes forfeit their
constitutional rights and plead guilty.
“The truth is that government officials have deliberately engineered the
system to assure that the jury trial system established by the
Constitution is seldom used,” said Timothy Lynch, director of the
criminal justice project at the libertarian Cato Institute. In other
words: the system is rigged.
In the race to incarcerate, politicians champion stiff sentences for
nearly all crimes, including harsh mandatory minimum sentences and
three-strikes laws; the result is a dramatic power shift, from judges to
prosecutors.
The Supreme Court ruled in 1978 that threatening someone with life
imprisonment for a minor crime in an effort to induce him to forfeit a
jury trial did not violate his Sixth Amendment right to trial. Thirteen
years later, in Harmelin v. Michigan, the court ruled that life
imprisonment for a first-time drug offense did not violate the Eighth
Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
No wonder, then, that most people waive their rights. Take the case of
Erma Faye Stewart, a single African-American mother of two who was
arrested at age 30 in a drug sweep in Hearne, Tex., in 2000. In jail,
with no one to care for her two young children, she began to panic.
Though she maintained her innocence, her court-appointed lawyer told her
to plead guilty, since the prosecutor offered probation. Ms. Stewart
spent a month in jail, and then relented to a plea. She was sentenced to
10 years’ probation and ordered to pay a $1,000 fine. Then her real
punishment began: upon her release, Ms. Stewart was saddled with a
felony record; she was destitute, barred from food stamps and evicted
from public housing. Once they were homeless, Ms. Stewart’s children
were taken away and placed in foster care. In the end, she lost
everything even though she took the deal.
On the phone, Susan said she knew exactly what was involved in asking
people who have been charged with crimes to reject plea bargains, and
press for trial. “Believe me, I know. I’m asking what we can do. Can we crash the system just by exercising our rights?”
The answer is yes. The system of mass incarceration depends almost
entirely on the cooperation of those it seeks to control. If everyone
charged with crimes suddenly exercised his constitutional rights, there
would not be enough judges, lawyers or prison cells to deal with the
ensuing tsunami of litigation. Not everyone would have to join for the
revolt to have an impact; as the legal scholar Angela J. Davis
noted, “if the number of people exercising their trial rights suddenly
doubled or tripled in some jurisdictions, it would create chaos.”
Such chaos would force mass incarceration to the top of the agenda for
politicians and policy makers, leaving them only two viable options:
sharply scale back the number of criminal cases filed (for drug
possession, for example) or amend the Constitution (or eviscerate it by
judicial “emergency” fiat). Either action would create a crisis and the
system would crash — it could no longer function as it had before. Mass
protest would force a public conversation that, to date, we have been
content to avoid.
In telling Susan that she was right, I found myself uneasy. “As a mother
myself, I don’t think there’s anything I wouldn’t plead guilty to if a
prosecutor told me that accepting a plea was the only way to get home to
my children,” I said. “I truly can’t imagine risking life imprisonment,
so how can I urge others to take that risk — even if it would send
shock waves through a fundamentally immoral and unjust system?”
Susan, silent for a while, replied: “I’m not saying we should do it. I’m
saying we ought to know that it’s an option. People should understand
that simply exercising their rights would shake the foundations of our
justice system which works only so long as we accept its terms. As you
know, another brutal system of racial and social control once prevailed
in this country, and it never would have ended if some people weren’t
willing to risk their lives. It would be nice if reasoned argument would
do, but as we’ve seen that’s just not the case. So maybe, just maybe,
if we truly want to end this system, some of us will have to risk our
lives.”
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