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The Silence of the Lawyers
As another grand jury has let a cop walk away for gratuitously killing an unarmed black man, a loud silence reverberates through the country, just at it has for many years. It is the silence of the nation's lawyers.
Dec 07, 2014
As another grand jury has let a cop walk away for gratuitously killing an unarmed black man, a loud silence reverberates through the country, just at it has for many years. It is the silence of the nation's lawyers.
The fact is, we operate two criminal justice systems in the United States. One is for affluent white people, who when accused of crime are treated as citizens, as people with rights. They get the benefit of the constitutional protections we boast about in textbooks and television shows, protections like due process and trial by jury and proof beyond reasonable doubt. And they are often shown great leniency for very serious crimes, including homicide.
The other system is for poor people and racial minorities, who are treated more like trash to be removed from the streets. They are policed as if they enemy combatants; churned through overcrowded, underfunded courts that traffic in guilty pleas and long prison sentences for minor offenses; and harassed or killed by cops whose brutality would never be tolerated against those whose wealth and skin color entitles them to the privileges and protections of the first system.
Another fact is, the vast majority of the American legal profession maintains steadfast silence about this two-tiered regime. There are vocal civil rights organizations, legal aid groups, lawyer-activists and scholars who tirelessly call attention to, and try to combat, what Michelle Alexander terms "the new Jim Crow" permeating American criminal justice. But these voices, articulate as they are, constitute only a small fraction of the nation's lawyers. The rest of the profession mostly prefers to keep its mouth shut and look the other way.
In this respect, as in others, the new Jim Crow differs little from the old one. A century ago, when swaths of the south were ruled by lynch law, and the rest of the country barely pretended to apply the bill of rights to people other than affluent whites, it was left to civil rights groups and a few conscientious lawyers to press for reform in the courts and other public arenas. Most of the profession, when not denouncing the reformers for stirring up trouble, sat on the sidelines and pretended not to know what everybody what every sentient person knew -- that in the administration of criminal justice, the constitutional promise of "equal protection of the laws" was nothing but a cruel joke.
And fifty years ago, when the Supreme Court finally began to take seriously the idea of equal protection, it did so despite the indifference, if not the active hostility of, much of the legal establishment. As Earl Warren and his colleagues embraced the radical proposition that the bill of rights actually applied to everyone, including racial minorities and poor people -- and that police, prosecutors and courts would have to change their practices accordingly -- the predominant reaction among legal elites was concern about judicial activism, about getting involved in messy social and political matters that did not lend themselves to "legal" resolution, were not the proper province of lawyers, were better left to others to fix.
And today? Most lawyers, if we think about the matter at all, know perfectly well that criminal justice in this country is in disgraceful condition, that it makes indefensible distinctions between white and black, rich and poor, first class and second class. It's just that we prefer not to talk about it. We leave that to the civil rights groups and the the criminal law specialists and the street protesters. Maybe we privately hope they succeed in changing things. But it's really not our problem. There's no money in it, and our well-heeled clients wouldn't be too happy if we criticized the system that treats them so well.
We should consider the possibility, though, that our silence is self-incriminating. Lawyers, after all, are the guardians of the legal process, and we profess allegiance to the ideal of equal justice under law. As we play the part of helpless bystander to America's two-track system, we do more than expose our fellow citizens to discrimination and mistreatment and gasps of "I can't breathe." We expose ourselves to charges of fraud.
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Third Party Candidates Add Fresh Perspective to Debates
Largely ignored by US cable news, int'l networks give outsiders platform
Oct 24, 2012
Eclipsed by the wake of the final presidential debate between Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama, four third-party candidates took the stage last night in Chicago: Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party, Jill Stein of the Green Party, Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party and Virgil Goode of the Constitution Party.
In an event sponsored by the Free and Equal Elections Foundation, arguably the most well-known person present was moderator Larry King.
Though they represented the poles of the political spectrum, the four nominees agreed on a number of issues unheard of in the previous debates. The ineffectiveness of the War on Drugs and the imperative to cut defense spending were echoed across the board.
The Commission on Presidential Debates excludes parties with less than 15 percent support nationwide. So far, the only candidate who has met that criteria is billionaire Ross Perot, who debated Bill Clinton and George H W Bush in 1992.
A second third-party debate will be held on October 30. Tuesday's debate was broadcasted by Al Jazeera and Russia Today--which can be viewed below--but largely ignored by all major US cable news networks.
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What a Difference Other Candidates Make
Haven't read Lee Fang's excellent expose on the lobbyists controlling the Presidential Debate Committee? You should. Then imagine what these debates would be like if things were very different. For one thing, there might be more parties' candidates included.
Oct 23, 2012
Haven't read Lee Fang's excellent expose on the lobbyists controlling the Presidential Debate Committee? You should. Then imagine what these debates would be like if things were very different. For one thing, there might be more parties' candidates included.
Thanks to Democracy Now, Jill Stein of the Green Party and Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party have been able to take part in three virtually-expanded debates. On no occasion was the contrast greater than in the foreign policy debate Tuesday night. While the word clouds over the Obama/Romney debate screamed "crippling, kill, world leader, Israel," the debate over at Democracy Now kept coming back to international law, climate change, morality and human rights.
Take the first segment. To Bob Schieffer's question about Libya, terrorism and US policy in the Middle East, Mitt Romney applauded the president: "We're going to have to recognize that we have to do as the president has done." The president appreciated the recognition. "I'm glad that you agree that we have been successful in going after al-Qaeda."
Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, on the other hand, had this to say:
"It's very clear that there is blowback going on now across the Middle East, not only the unrest directed at the Libyan embassy, likewise at the embassies really across the Middle East, including in Egypt. We are seeing in Afghanistan our soldiers are being shot at by the police forces that they are supposed to be training in Afghanistan. We're seeing in Pakistan that 75 percent of Pakistanis actually identify the United States now as their enemy, not as their supporter or their ally. And, you know, in many ways, we're seeing a very ill-conceived, irresponsible and immoral war policy come back to haunt us, where United States foreign policies have been based, unfortunately, on brute military force and wars for oil."
Rocky Anderson, presidential candidate of the Justice Party added this:
"We're like the bully that never got counseling, and we keep wondering, why don't they like us? We invaded Iraq and occupied that country. It was completely illegal. Two United Nations secretaries-general declared that it was illegal. It was a war of aggression, and it was all done on a pack of lies. Now, we aggravate the situation by keeping bases in so many other nations, including Saudi Arabia, bolstering these tyrants and, at the same time, engaging in direct, unmanned drone strikes in at least four sovereign nations, killing, in the process, hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent men, women and children. That is the policy failure: our belligerence, our efforts to control, to dominate and to make certain that we will always have that control over the resources in these nations. That's what this is all about..."
Libertarian party candidate Gary Johnson declined to take part.
For democracy to flourish, we need not only a corproate-free debate committee, we need a way to break through the monopoly of the two party system. That problem's only gotten harder as the wealth gap has grown and the cost of competing for office in this country has sky-rocketed. What's the number one security threat facing American democracy? If last night's debate is anything to go by, it's the narrow range of policy alternatives on basic issues brought to us by big money in poliitcs.
For more on why our election system needs radical change, check out these commentaries from pro-democracy activists James Rucker co-founder of Color of Change and the New Organizing Institute's Ashindi Maxton. The Why We Care series continues this week with John Nichols & Robert McChesney and Bob Edgar of Common Cause.
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