By Mansfield Frazier
Currently, I’m gradually working my way through a new book by recently-deceased Harvard Law Professor William J. Stuntz titled The Collapse of American Criminal Justice. The work is a brilliant, albeit sometimes disgusting, retracing of the history of our legal system from the founding of the Republic to the present day. It depicts our past… warts and all.
In the book the author examines what the Founding Fathers did right (in terms of The Bill of Rights and other Constitutional guarantees), plus how and why — over the intervening centuries — things have gone so very wrong. Stuntz explodes myth after legal myth as he — chapter by chapter — details how the Courts have twisted our nation’s laws beyond recognition of their original intent, purpose and utility, and, in the process, have greatly reduced (and in some instances virtually eliminated) any chance of fair treatment for the average citizen… and especially citizens of color.
His indictment of our criminal justice system echoes the work of Ohio State Associate Law Professor Michelle Alexander, who, in her best-selling book The New Jim Crow, makes similar arguments. Thankfully, both books lay out a path, which, if our nation follows, would lead to a restoration of the equal treatment that once made us a legal beacon for the rest of the world.
Indeed, U.S. Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia (a certified war hero and not known to be soft on crime) has, for the last three years, been calling for the establishment of a blue-ribbon panel in Congress to examine our broken system of crime and punishment… a system he described as “…being in a profound, deeply corrosive crisis that we have largely been ignoring at our peril.”
Before anyone jumps to the conclusion that Stuntz was just a “pointy-headed liberal professor,” Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan (whom Stuntz taught under when she was dean of Harvard Law) said in an interview immediately after his death: “…despite his self-professed conservative inclinations… what was fascinating about him was that everybody read him and listened to him and took seriously what he said.” Read the book and you will take him and his positions quite seriously also.
How bad are things in legal America? In the 1990s, the Commonwealth of Virginia’s courts did not allow prisoners to bring new exculpatory evidence more than three weeks after sentencing. When a prisoner condemned to death petitioned a Virginia Circuit Court to review new evidence on his behalf, then-Attorney General Mary Sue Terry filed a brief that argued: “Evidence of innocence is irrelevant.” Absolutely, incontrovertibly mind-boggling… could an American elected official really have uttered such words? Yes, she did. However, it’s only one of a litany of egregious examples to be found of how far the pendulum has swung away from true justice in America. Scared yet? You should be.
In addition (as I wrote last week), ProPublica, the independent, non-profit organization that produces investigative journalism in the public interest, recently released the results of a year-long study that proved when citizens apply for a presidential pardon whites are four times more likely than blacks to receive one. If the criminal justice system is this deeply flawed at the absolute highest level of government (can there be any higher?), what are the chances of it being fair at any level below?
One of Stuntz’s main arguments has to do with what has caused crime rates to go up and down over the decades in this country. And, while he acknowledges that economics plays somewhat of a role, he posits that basic fairness on the part of law enforcement — from police, to prosecutors, to judges — plays a much larger role in increased crime rates.
Stuntz writes: “When the justice system seems legitimate to the young men it targets, those young men are much more likely to follow the system’s rules. When that justice system seems illegitimate to those same young men, crime becomes more common, and controlling it becomes more difficult.”
Now, when all credible studies show Blacks, Whites and Hispanics all buy, sell and use drugs at exactly the same rate (11 percent of each group’s population) why is it that Blacks are seven times more likely to end up in prison on drug charges (Hispanics five times more likely) than Whites?
When the Plain Dealer did an exhaustive series on the unfairness emanating from the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office, Bill Mason countered it by going to the University of Cincinnati and paying researchers there for a whitewash paper. And he got what he paid for: the school found no discrimination in how justice is meted out in Cuyahoga County. Problem is, as Judge Ron Adrine and ACLU attorney Jim Hardiman pointed out, researchers at that institution have never found fault with a law enforcement agency they’ve examined… at least not with one that paid them.
With no candidate for county prosecutor garnering enough votes for an endorsement when the Executive Committee of the Democratic Party met last week, that race is thrown wide open… as it should be. Perhaps the electorate of the county is finally wising up, if just a bit.
This is arguably the most important job in local government, and now candidates can be asked hard, tough questions at open forums so that voters can get to know who they are and where they stand.
Questions like:
Why do you want the job?
What’s the most important function of the prosecutor’s office?
What is your opinion of how the office has been run in the past?
Will you keep all of the current prosecutors?
More to come…
From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available again in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author by visiting http://www.neighborhoodsolutionsinc.com.
2 Responses to “MANSFIELD: Justice… County Style”
Indy
Mansfield protests too loudly.
If whites are 4-times as likely to receive a presidential pardon, maybe it’s because 4-times as many apply. You have a black president and a black attorney general. Are they racists?
As for drug sentencing, blacks are more likely to knack you on the head and take your money. Young white drug addicts are more likely to hang out in their parents’ houses and take drugs from their parents’ medicine cabinets. Oxycotin et al. this pattern is a lot less likely to get caught by police.
Al;though I have no statistics, I don’t think that the blacks I have known who grow up, get an education, learn a skill, and get a job are any more likely than whites in the same condition to get imprisoned.
mansfieldf
I don’t usually respond to readers’ remarks, but this one is so dumb it’s beyond belief. To say that whites are four times as likely to receive a pardon because perhaps four times as many of them applied shows a total lack of understanding of very basic journalism studies. It goes like this: the same number of applicants from each group is surveyed and the results looked at. The fact the president and attorney general are black has nothing to do with the findings … fewer black applications ever make it to the president’s desk.
As for drug arrests, the reader is wrong again. Even among those arrested (black and white) whites are far less likely to be sent to prison. I know that some folks have a hard time coming to grips with the racism in our justice system, but only a liar or fool will say it does not exist.