October 24th, 2018

More of This Meet the judge put a defendant’s racist views on the stand

A group of 10 white teenagers in Mississippi went to Jackson, the state capital, from a neighboring county in June 2011 on a drunken mission to terrorize black residents.

James Craig Anderson, who worked at a local Nissan plant, became their target. He was standing near his car in the parking lot of a motel just off a highway when the teenagers, both male and female, pounced.

“White power!” they yelled as some of them pummeled Mr. Anderson, who was 47, and stole his cellphone, his wallet and a ring. One of the teenagers in the group, who was behind the wheel of a Ford pickup truck, fatally struck Mr. Anderson with the vehicle.

The prosecutions that followed were the first uses of the federal Hate Crimes Act in the Deep South, and all 10 teenagers were charged under the act. Judge Henry T. Wingate presided over one of the resulting trials, the subject of the recent hourlong TV documentary called “Love & Hate Crime: A Murder in Mississippi.”

One of the four defendants in that trial was Sarah Graves, who was riding in the pickup truck when Mr. Anderson was struck and killed; she pleaded guilty to conspiring to violate the federal hate crime law and received a maximum sentence of five years.

Her mother, Mary Miles Harvey, wrote to the court asking for leniency, saying that she did not raise her daughter to be a racist. During Sarah’s sentencing, Judge Wingate, who is black, called Ms. Harvey to the stand for questioning.

What was your initial reaction to the James Craig Anderson case?
James Craig Anderson should not have died. Unfortunately, he simply was the victim of a society which as yet has not healed itself. He had a family, and by all accounts was an employed, law-abiding citizen. His flaw: Being an African-American, being an innocent victim enveloped in the clutches of robotic, mechanical racial hatred, the seeds of which were planted and nurtured by racist literature, demagoguery, and ignorance.

In the documentary, you say, “I could have been out there walking.” What did you mean by that?
I was trying to make a point. Racism, which is blind, is immune to positions of wealth, learning, intelligence, or even Christian principles. When I take off my robe and walk the streets, to unfamiliar observers I am simply an African-American, naked and unclothed with the armor of my office.

During the sentencing phase of the trial, you called Sarah Graves’s mother to the stand. And after the trial, you sat down with her and asked her to reflect on her prejudices. Why?
After Sarah Graves entered a guilty plea, she decided to write me a letter. She wanted me to know that she was sorry for her involvement in Mr. Anderson’s death. She also wanted me to know that if she had formed her racist views during her childhood, she had been motivated by her own mother, who frequently used racial and hateful language at home. I figured Sarah’s mother was unaware of this letter, because she had submitted her own in which she asked for mercy for her daughter. She claimed that Sarah merely had been at the wrong place at the wrong time and that she had raised her child better than that. I could not ignore this. So, I questioned her on it during sentencing.

And what happened when you met with Sarah’s mother after the trial was over?
I sat down with her and her four-year-old granddaughter and husband. She admitted she had used the racial terms her daughter had outlined in her letter. She apologized for lying and for the miseducation of her daughter. She stated that her racial views had been planted by her family during her formative years. She vowed to do better and, as proof, she directed her little granddaughter to eventually spend time with me in my capacity as a judge.

Story by NY Times >

Watch This What its like to be a Black Trans Woman in America

The following video is part of a series of short documentaries produced by the ACLU about the resilience of the transgender community.​

Story by Them >

This Week on Twitter #WontBeErased

We’ve been walking this earth before men spoke their first words. We were high priestesses, messengers of the divine, healers, queens’ lovers and kings’ concubines. We were revered. We will show our resilience & we will rise again & again. #WontBeErased https://t.co/NDUhKiR523

— Cecilia Chung (@cecilia_c_chung) October 21, 2018

Cecilia Chung is the founder of the TransMarch and former deputy director of Transgender Law Center, a California ChangeLawyers grant partner.

Speaking of… Why are DAs prosecuting transgender people who defend themselves?

“I can hardly breathe,” Asher Torres told the 911 operator, as he strained to get the words out between gasps. “I’ve been so hit so hard.” It was approximately 1:30 a.m. on Oct. 4, 2017, and Torres, 34, was calling from the lobby of the Wythe Hotel in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood. Torres and his boyfriend, 25-year-old Stevie Sullivan, were attending a party when they said they were attacked. “This person had a problem with us because we’re trans,” Torres told the operator as he described the assault and his injuries, “and he just went after my partner.” 

But when officers from the NYPD’s 94th Precinct arrived at the Wythe, they arrested Torres and Sullivan instead of the individual Torres had identified as an assailant, hotel employee Alex Hernandez. Soon afterward, and despite surveillance video from the hotel indicating Hernandez striked the couple before they fought back, prosecutors from the Brooklyn district attorney’s office filed misdemeanor charges against Torres and Hernandez that included assault, attempted assault and menacing in the third degree.

For transgender advocates, the Sullivan case is emblematic of the persistent risks to their safety as well as the legal peril they face when they defend themselves. Many gender nonconforming people live with the constant threat of violence. In 2017, advocates tracked at least 29 killings of transgender people in the United States, the most ever recorded. Yet instead of receiving support from the criminal justice system, victims who survive violence are often retraumatized or criminalized by it.

“This case points to mistreatment and criminalization of transgender people at the hands of law enforcement and why transgender people are often reluctant to report harassment and violence to law enforcement,” said Shelby Chestnut, co-director of policy and strategic projects at the Transgender Law Center in Oakland, California. “All charges against Stevie should be dropped.”

Like Sullivan, many in the transgender community have faced prosecution for defending themselves. In late 2017, transgender activist Ceyenne Doroshow was arrested and charged with assault in Queens after she says she defended herself from an abusive partner. In June 2012, CeCe McDonald, a Black transgender woman in Minneapolis, was sentenced to 41 months in prison for second-degree manslaughter after she fought off a group who assaulted her and her friends outside a bar. (One of the assailants died after McDonald stabbed him with a pair of scissors she’d retrieved from her purse.) Ky Peterson, a Black trans man from Georgia, is serving a 20-year sentence for shooting a man who raped him in a trailer park.

“[This experience] has made it obvious to me that existing as a queer, trans person is not safe,” Sullivan said in a statement released through his attorney. “This started with me being attacked. My assailant was never arrested, but I was charged with assault. This prosecution has gone on for over a year. It has been terrifying.”

Story by the Appeal > 

Perspective How aging inmates helped me turn my life around. They could do even more good on the outside.

I can speak for both myself and my older brother, Darryl, when I say that March 8, 2000, was the most regrettable day of our lives. On that day, I accompanied Darryl to an encounter with a gang member who, days earlier, had sexually assaulted Darryl’s wife. We were both armed. Rather than report the assault, we set out for a confrontation. Within seconds, the situation escalated and Darryl fired several shots in a struggle for the gun, wounding the gang member and himself. Darryl and I survived. The gang member did not.

I was 20 and Darryl was 21. We had every reason to think we’d spend the rest of our lives in jail. But Justice Gustin L. Reichbach did something unexpected, something that probably saved both our lives: He did not impose the maximum prison sentence of 40 years to life — the equivalent of life without parole — and instead sentenced each of us to serve 17½ years to life.

In 2017 Darryl and I were paroled just after serving our minimum sentence. This was rare. When we entered the system in 2000, only a very small percentage of violent offenders — by some estimates, roughly 3 percent — serving life sentences in New York had been paroled after serving their minimum sentence. That aversion to parole, together with tougher sentencing laws, has contributed to what is now an aging prisoner population, with New York housing more than 10,000 inmates age 50 or older.

Today, I’m a full-time student at Cornell, majoring in government, while Darryl is making his mark in the Justice-in-Education program at Columbia. The most frequent question Darryl and I get is: “Exactly how did you guys do it?”

Evidently, the notion that convicted felons can ascend from the lowest depths of maximum security to the Ivy League is counterintuitive. But I’m quick to deny that Darryl and I are somehow exceptional. In prison, we shined because of, not despite, our circumstances, especially the presence of the “old-timers” who helped guide us to our coming-of-age. We owe them tremendous credit.

Recently, I had the privilege of reuniting with one of those men, 62-year-old Mark Thompson, at a performance by the Phoenix Players Theater Group at the Auburn Correctional Facility. Mark was locked up in his 20s and has served 38 years of his minimum sentence (66 years to life), with 28 more to go. Darryl and I sought advice from Mark while we were at Five Points.

In his time as a prisoner, he has earned a bachelor of science degree, led alcohol and substance abuse training for other prisoners, and served as a peer and youth counselor. Today Mark is losing his vision and battling hypertension, and has several other physical ailments. This reunion was certainly bittersweet, with me as a visitor and Mark still wearing the green prison garb I so eagerly left behind.

In his time as a prisoner, he has earned a bachelor of science degree, led alcohol and substance abuse training for other prisoners, and served as a peer and youth counselor. Today Mark is losing his vision and battling hypertension, and has several other physical ailments. This reunion was certainly bittersweet, with me as a visitor and Mark still wearing the green prison garb I so eagerly left behind.

It’s clear that our prison population is aging, but we cannot die ourselves out of mass incarceration.

We must seriously consider whether society would benefit by letting reformed offenders re-enter their community, and whether it’s economical and humane to punish solely for the sake of retribution. 

I know that among the nation’s enormous prison population are untold numbers of incarcerated men and women who are remorseful and have proven over many years that they are ready to enrich any community they live in. They are truly remarkable and would have plenty to give on the outside. We need to begin working toward more-just alternatives to long-term incarceration, so that there can be more stories like mine and Darryl’s, and fewer young people making the mistakes that get them sent to prison in the first place.

Story by NY Times > 

Second Chances She prayed he would burn in hell. Then she became his biggest advocate.

This piece is excerpted from Rectify: The Power of Restorative Justice After Wrongful Conviction by Lara Bazelon, a law professor at USF.
Shannon Coleman will never forget the October day in 1991 when she found out that her great aunt, Louise Talley, had been brutally robbed, raped, and stabbed to death in her home. 

Coleman, who was then 32 and recently engaged, sank down on the steps of her townhouse and wept when she heard about her aunt’s killing. The vicious, lethal violence inflicted on Talley left her sickened and bewildered, then furious.

Coleman stayed close to the investigation, learning that a 20-year-old black man named Anthony Wright had been arrested almost immediately and had signed a confession. Though Wright recanted that confession, claiming the interrogating officers threatened to beat and maim him, Coleman was absolutely convinced of his guilt.

Coleman prayed, she says, “that he would burn in hell.” Years passed, then decades.

In 2015, Rolling Stone published a stunning exposé of Wright’s case, reporting that DNA evidence retrieved from Talley’s body matched a now-deceased crack addict named Ronnie Byrd. There was more: allegations of misconduct by the investigating Philadelphia police detectives Manuel Santiago, Martin Devlin, and Frank Jastrzembski, including the accusation that Jastrzembski had planted clothes with Talley’s blood in Wright’s bedroom. Reading the article, Coleman was beset by doubt. Several weeks later, she sat down with one of Wright’s attorneys, Sam Silver, as he detailed the Innocence Project’s decadelong fight to exonerate Wright, which had met with fierce resistance from prosecutors.

When she left, Coleman was reeling. Although the DNA evidence was enough to overturn Wright’s conviction, then–Philadelphia District Attorney R. Seth Williams was determined to retry him under a new theory. In 1993, prosecutors had told the jury that Wright acted alone. Twenty-five years later, they were prepared to argue that Wright and Byrd—who had no connection to one another—had committed crimes together, with Wright stabbing Talley repeatedly and Byrd raping her.

Coleman didn’t believe this theory, and she’d come to believe very strongly in Wright’s innocence. “I am not a person who takes no for an answer,” Coleman says, “so my thought was, I am getting him out.” Coleman wrote to the mayor, the governor, and to church groups. She asked a friend she knew on the City Council for help—“anything I could think of to get it stopped.” She started a Change.org petition, writing, “there has been no justice in this case. Instead, there has been another crime committed—and it is against Anthony Wright. He has lost 25 years of his life. He was unable to see his son grow up or be at his mother’s funeral. He has lost so much. There is no earthly reason why this man is still incarcerated.” After collecting nearly 40,000 signatures in less than six weeks, she sent the petition to Williams. He ignored her.

Wright’s retrial went forward. Coleman could not get time off from work, but she left early on several afternoons to sit in the courtroom and watch. Throughout, she struggled to sleep at night. On Aug. 23, 2016, when she got a text saying that Wright had been acquitted, Coleman says, “I stood up in my office and screamed.” The deliberations had lasted five minutes. Afterward, the jury forewoman told reporters, “I’m angry. The evidence was there that he did not commit this crime. The city should have never brought this case.”

Shortly after his release, Wright had filed a lawsuit against the city of Philadelphia seeking damages for “egregious misconduct” by the police. It was settled in June for nearly $10 million. Larry Krasner, who replaced Williams as Philadelphia’s district attorney after running on a reform platform, called the decision to compensate Wright “commendable.”

In the process of litigating Wright’s civil lawsuit, his lawyers uncovered evidence that Bridget Kirn, the lead prosecutor at the retrial, had stood by silently and allowed two of the original detectives, Santiago and Jastrzembski, to perjure themselves. Fired by Krasner in January, Kirn now stands accused of professional misconduct that could lead to her disbarment. (Williams, her former boss, is currently serving a five-year sentence in federal prison for bribery and corruption.)

How could this have happened?

The criminal justice system is only as good as the people who work inside of it. When police detectives decide that terrorizing suspects, lying, and planting evidence is acceptable and prosecutors put securing convictions above the truth, the system fails and the consequences are catastrophic. To all of them, it seemed, Wright’s life was disposable. Maybe they told themselves he was guilty anyway. He wasn’t. Maybe they told themselves they were acting in service of the victims. They weren’t.

Amazingly, Wright and Coleman have found solace in each other. They have become close friends, in constant communication, and speak together whenever they have an opportunity to press those in power for change, however incremental. Coleman said the restorative power of this relationship—“my love for Tony”— has released her from her own prison of guilt and shame as she tries to remake a horrible story into a healing one.

Story by Slate >

Job Opportunity Justice & Diversity Center hiring bi-lingual domestic violence lawyer

The Bi-lingual Domestic Violence Attorney will primarily represent survivors of domestic violence in cases before the San Francisco Unified Family Court. The position also provides brief advice and limited-scope representation on emergency matters.

Apply here >

Job Opportunity PANA San Diego hiring staff attorney

San Diego County’s refugee and muslim communities face ongoing and growing legal needs. PANA is hiring a full-time attorney to develop a legal program that will triage legal services for refugees and asylum seekers

Apply here >

Mentors Wanted

The Youth Law Academy at Centro Legal de la Raza is currently recruiting attorney mentors for this academic year. YLA is a legal diversity pipeline program working to open the doors of the legal profession for the next generation of underrepresented attorneys

Mentorship application here >