Dear Readers,
My legal team and I welcome you all to yet another insightful issue of the Voices for Justice newsletter. In last month’s issue, we discussed the legacy of slavery and how it still systematically frames our lives in the 21st century and the mass incarceration of people of color. The racial bias in our criminal justice system and the hyper explosive growth of our nation’s prison population is enough for any human being to be concerned about the future of race and the criminal justice system in this country, for it is devastating and also politically consequential.
In this month’s issue of Voices of Justice, we address the problems inherent to wrongful convictions and its disproportionate impact on people of color. Race is central to every aspect of criminal justice in the United States. A substantial majority of innocent people who are convicted of crimes in the United States are African-American. In an eye-opening study conducted by the University of Michigan Law School, “African-Americans are only 13% of the American population but a majority of innocent defendants wrongfully convicted of crimes and later exonerated.” On October 15, 2016, the National Registry of Exonerations listed 1,900 defendants who were convicted of crimes and later exonerated because they were innocent. It was also reported that 40% of them were African-American. Out of the 1,900 exonerations, 762 were for wrongful murder convictions with 50% of those exonerees being African-American. Even more startilling, 221 of the exonerations were for drug related crimes with African-Americans leading the charge with 55%, Hispanics with 19%, and Whites at 24%. In an April 12, 2017 comprehensive study compiled by Christopher J. Coyne and Abigail R. Hall for CATO Institute, “Black men are sent to prisons on drug charges at 13 times the rate of white men.” There is no single explanation for this huge racial disparity. It has several causes, all of which point to the same direction.
In the past decade, there have been more newspaper stories, magazine articles, podcasts, and television documentaries on the plight of the wrongfully convicted than every before, bringing the troubling reality of wrongful convictions to the forefront of public discourse. As a result, there is greater recognition across the political spectrum that wrongful convictions of the innocent is a real and ongoing social and legal problem. In an April 7, 2009 article in the New York Law Journal, New York City judge Barry Karmins admonished delegates that whenever an innocent person is wrongfully convicted, the entire criminal justice system suffers. “It is difficult to imagine what individuals must endure mentally, physically, and emotionally after being incarcerated for months and years for crimes they did not commit.”
The worst effect of the invisibility of wrongful convictions is the most direct: for the most part, they are uncorrected. Those who have been exonerated spent on average more than 14 years in prison before they are released. Many more have not been exonerated at all; more often than not, they will die in prison. Such a miscarriage of justice not just affect those who are wrongfully convicted, but the social fabric of our nation. Exonerated defendants go to prison, but not because they deserve to; they like those who are killed, are innocent victims of crimes committed by others. A false conviction is a tragedy for the innocent defendant and his/her family whose lives may be destroyed.
Earlier this week during one of my leisure reads, I interestingly came across a March 24, 1988 editorial titled “The War Goes On” by the Los Angeles Sentinel, the city’s leading Black newspaper. What caught my attention in this particular article was the author’s disparaging analogy of the then-current crack epidemic and slavery in saying, “this is perhaps the most serious threat we have faced since the end of slavery.” Upon reading this bizarre claim, I became quite infuriated by this author’s nonsensical comparison. Respectfully, in response to this author’s misguided fallacy, I would like to point out that nowhere in the history of mankind, nothing has come remotely closer to slavery than the prison industrial system, which has–and continues to–warehouse people of color due to its racial bias, sweeping legislations and punitive policies that target and ravage poor communities of color more than anywhere else. Let it also be a reminder that in the magnitude of the threat wrongful convictions pose to Black and Brown people in America, the mass-incarceration epidemic has exceeded the crack-cocaine crisis of mid-1980s through the early 1990s.
In sum, while these studies and findings are helpful, they ultimately have limited value unless they serve to ignite policy makers and the criminal justice community into taking the necessary steps to correct the systematic problems that have been identified. For so long, Black and Brown people in this country have long been vigilant, often to no avail, in their arduous fight for freedom, liberty, and equality enshrined in our nation’s ideals: equal protection of the law, and equal justice under the law. Although wrongful convictions have found greater traction in the media, despite the increasing academic and political attention that has been given to the topic, there will never be true reform without emphasizing integrity and holding the criminal justice system accountable.
LOVE, PEACE, TRUTH, JUSTICE, FREEDOM!
“Justice delayed, is justice denied,”
Gary Benloss
(#03A6415)
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