DONATE

Latest News

780 438 admin5

Baltimore Officers Charged in Freddie Gray’s Death Seek to Move Trial

2015/5/28-The six Baltimore police officers who were charged this month in the death of Freddie Gray asked a Maryland judge on Wednesday to move their trial from the city, where suspicions of police misconduct provoked both violent unrest and days of peaceful demonstrations.

The 85-page motion, filed in the Circuit Court for Baltimore City, chronicled the widespread anger in Baltimore after Mr. Gray’s death, as well the effects of the strategies to restore order, including a 10 p.m. curfew. The demonstrations and the government’s response to them, lawyers for the officers wrote, would make it all but impossible to select an impartial jury.

“Every citizen of Baltimore was impacted by the events surrounding the arrest and death of Freddie Gray,” the motion said, “and every potential juror would bring their passions and prejudices relating to the events with them to the courtroom.”

A spokeswoman for Marilyn J. Mosby, the state’s attorney for Baltimore City, did not respond to a message seeking comment.

Although the officers facing prosecution — Caesar R. Goodson Jr., Garrett E. Miller, Edward M. Nero, William G. Porter, Lt. Brian Rice and Sgt. Alicia White — were charged with different offenses, their lawyers filed the motion together. The officers will be arraigned on July 2, more than 10 weeks after Mr. Gray died of injuries he suffered while in police custody.

The officers’ request for an alternative venue had been expected. In their motion, lawyers for the officers argued that prospective jurors had been influenced by the onslaught of public attention to Mr. Gray’s death and the protests that followed, as well as comments by elected officials.

“The jurors watched on the news (or in person) their community burning, vehicles being smashed and set on fire, riots erupting around the city, businesses being vandalized and looted,” the motion said. “The potential jurors also witnessed a phenomenon that will likely occur during trial. That is, every time a decision in the Freddie Gray case had to be made, a large demonstration was scheduled outside of the applicable venue.”

Compelling Baltimore residents to serve as jurors with such “a spectacle” underway during a trial in the city, the lawyers said, “would be unfair and wholly improper.”

Source: The New York Times

Alan Blinder

675 450 admin5

Public-Sector Jobs Vanish, Hitting Blacks Hard

2015/05/24 – For the Ingram clan, working for the Miami-Dade County transit system has led to regular paychecks, a steady advance up the economic ladder and even romance.

By driving buses in Miami’s sun-scraped communities, Richard Ingram and his wife, Susie, were able to join the ranks of the black middle class, moving with their four sons from a rental in the down-and-out neighborhood of Overtown eventually into their own house in central Miami.

Two of their children later followed them to the county bus depot. The eldest son, also named Richard, met his future wife there when she was assigned to the same route as his father.

“I tell you, my job is a godsend,” Richard Ingram Jr. said.

Now his older son, 21-year-old DQuan, is applying to take the transit system test, hoping to become a third-generation driver. But Mr. Ingram said that unlike when he was hired, today the competition is tougher and the jobs are a lot scarcer.

For the Ingrams and millions of other black families, working for the government has long provided a dependable pathway to the middle class and a measure of security harder to find in the private sector, particularly for those without college degrees.

Roughly one in five black adults works for the government, teaching school, delivering mail, driving buses, processing criminal justice and managing large staffs. They are about 30 percent more likely to have a public sector job than non-Hispanic whites, and twice as likely as Hispanics.

“Compared to the private sector, the public sector has offered black and female workers better pay, job stability and more professional and managerial opportunities,” said Jennifer Laird, a sociologist at the University of Washington who has been researching the subject.

During the Great Recession, though, as tax revenues plunged, federal, state and local governments began shedding jobs. Even now, with the economy regaining strength, public sector employment has still not bounced back. An incomplete recovery is part of the reason, but a combination of strong anti-government and anti-tax sentiment in some places has kept down public payrolls. At the same time, attempts to curb collective bargaining, like those led by Wisconsin’s governor, Scott Walker, a likely Republican presidential candidate, have weakened public unions.

The Labor Department counts half a million fewer public sector jobs than before the start of the recession in 2007. That figure, however, understates just how much the government’s work force has shrunk, said Elise Gould, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a labor-oriented research organization in Washington. That is because it fails to account for the normal growth in the country’s population: Factor that in, she said, and there are 1.8 million fewer jobs in the public sector for people to fill.

The decline reverses a historical pattern, researchers say, with public sector employees typically holding onto their jobs even during most economic downturns.

Because blacks hold a disproportionate share of the jobs, relative to their share of the population, the cutbacks naturally hit them harder.

But black workers overall, women in particular, also lost their jobs at a higher rate than whites, Ms. Laird found. There was a “double disadvantage for black public sector workers,” she said. “They are concentrated in a shrinking sector of the economy, and they are substantially more likely than other public sector workers to be without work.”

In Miami’s public schools, many of the layoffs in recent years have fallen on secretaries, school monitors and paraprofessionals, said Fedrick Ingram, president of the United Teachers of Dade and one of the Ingram brothers. His bargaining unit lost more than 6,000 positions since 2009 at the same time the number of students was increasing, he said.

“During the recession, we had a really hard time in the school system,” said Mr. Ingram, 41, who was previously a music teacher, a career spurred on by the music and dancing lessons his mother insisted he and his brothers take. “They’re still hiring a lot more people part time so they don’t have to pay benefits. Even for teachers, there’s no tenure and very little job security.”

Melody Glenn, 47, an elementary schoolteacher in Dade for 22 years, is a second-generation public sector employee, earning $55,000 a year. Her mother was a cafeteria supervisor in the public schools, while her father worked as a mechanic for the Postal Service.

Now she lives in the middle-income suburb of Miami Gardens, a few blocks away from Fedrick’s brother Richard. On a recent Saturday morning, she and Richard stood together on the sidelines, snapping photos as their 12-year-old sons ran drills in a free training camp sponsored by the Miami Dolphins.

Ms. Glenn said her 25-year-old daughter, Courtney, has two part-time jobs, one providing after care in the schools and the other working for Tri-Rail, South Florida’s commuter rail system.

“She can’t find a full-time job,” Ms. Glenn said. “She’s waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting for an interview right now.”

Photo

The Ingrams: from left, Richard Jr.; Richard, a former driver; Susie, a retired driver; Fedrick, a teachers’ union leader; Jordan; and Randy, a transit system technician. CreditAngel Valentin for The New York Times

To make ends meet, they all live together: Ms. Glenn, her three children and her two grandchildren.

Budget cuts have compounded the struggles of black communities. “We lost a lot of programs,” Ms. Glenn said, remembering, for instance, summers in the parks where she spent entire days as a child, swimming, playing tennis and going on field trips, with lunch and tutoring thrown in.

Richard Ingram Jr. nodded his head. “All you had to do was sign up,” he said. “Now the park doesn’t have staff.” He tries to fill in, running a sports league, chauffeuring his son’s friends to practices and even supplying cleats when one of them cannot afford a pair.

The recession was particularly hard on the black middle class, erasing three decades of economic gains. A new analysis of foreclosures between 2005 and 2009 by researchers at Cornell, for example, found that “mostly black and mostly Latino neighborhoods lost homes at rates approximately three times higher than white areas.”

Today, blacks are less likely than whites to own their own homes or have sizable retirement savings, two of the primary ways most families accumulate wealth. In 2013, the median white family had net assets of $142,000 compared with $11,000 for the median black family, according to the Pew Research Center. The difficulty in closing that gap is compounded by the fact that the median income for black households is just 60 percent of that of whites.

Photo

Richard Ingram Jr., 42, followed his parents to the Miami-Dade County bus system.CreditAngel Valentin for The New York Times

Many employed blacks are stuck in lower-wage industries that tend to have fewer benefits and higher turnover, which is one reason public sector jobs — more likely to be unionized and subject to stricter anti-discrimination protections — have been such a magnet for blacks.

Thanks to a series of presidential executive orders and court decisions that began in the 1960s, a rapidly expanding public sector welcomed blacks and women who had been locked out of other corners of the labor market. With the federal government paving the way, state and local governments soon followed, and they continued to expand their work forces through the late 2000s even as the size of the federal government stabilized.

“Where else can you get a middle-class job without a college degree?” asked Bruce Bodner, the lawyer for the Transit Workers Union Local 234 in Philadelphia. A bus driver there who has been on the job for more than four years earns an average of $64,000 a year including overtime pay, he said, and skilled craft workers, like mechanics and carpenters, can earn more. Nearly 60 percent of the roughly 5,000 people who work for the city’s transit system, he said, are black.

State and local government workers earned an average of $28.17 an hour in December 2014, according to the Labor Department, in addition to a basket of other benefits worth nearly $16 an hour. (For a typical 35-hour week, that is roughly $51,000 a year, plus $29,000 in benefits.) Often their paychecks are supplemented with overtime.

In Miami, a bus operator’s base pay falls between $32,000 and $50,000, without overtime, according to county figures.

The senior Richard Ingram, now 62, worked as a porter, short-order cook and roofer before he got a job cleaning buses with the transit authority in 1979 as a result of a now defunct federal jobs training program.

After more than 30 years, most of them spent driving, Mr. Ingram — his uniform a medley of green down to his avocado-color leather shoes — is now off the bus, checking drivers’ schedules and paperwork, beginning at 4:30 a.m. each weekday and leaving at 2:30 p.m. He is thinking of retiring this year with a pension, as his wife, Susie, did in 2013 after 20 years behind the wheel.

Their son Richard, 42, also remembers a string of low-paying jobs, including stints at Burger King and Jiffy Lube, and as a security guard and D.J., before he joined the transit system in 2000.

“That was the stability I was looking for,” said Mr. Ingram Jr., who works a 52-hour week. His younger brother, Randy, who began driving at the same time, recently switched to a job as a transit electronic technician, working from 7 p.m. to 5 a.m. With children at home, he found the night shift a struggle, but he wanted the opportunity to move up.

Supporters of curbs on the collective bargaining power of government employee unions like the one led by Mr. Walker, of Wisconsin, said they were aimed at saving taxpayer money and improving efficiency.

But some researchers and union officials also see a racial undercurrent in the campaigns.

“With public employment in general being under attack, it’s really an attack on these communities,” said Mr. Bodner of the Philadelphia transit workers union, referring to black people.

Florida government workers have been targeted as well, Fedrick Ingram said, noting that the Republican Gov. “Rick Scott went directly after the unions here.”

In Miami, the drivers have resisted attempts to take away benefits, Richard Ingram said, but temporarily lost some paid holidays, overtime and bonuses.

Still, he is grateful for what he described as a “a job that you can count on and that could get you what you wanted if you worked hard enough.”

Source: The New York Times

Patrica Cohen

1024 423 admin5

Segregationists Never Went Away: We Just Call Them “Small-Government Conservatives” Now

Black freedom & opportunity in America has always required the very federal intervention the right wants to destroy

2015/5/27-The continuing decline of public sector jobs at local, state, and federal levels is having an abysmal economic impact on African Americans, for whom steady, stable government employment opportunities have provided a sure path into the middle class. The New York Times reported yesterday that “roughly one in five black adults works for the government, teaching school, delivering mail, driving buses, processing criminal justice and managing large staffs.” Because Black people hold a disproportionate number of government jobs, cutbacks that affect everyone hit Black communities even harder.

In many ways that goes without saying. When America sneezes, Black America gets the flu. But I want to suggest that something even more sinister animates this swift pivot in the country away from an investment in public goods and services. It is not simply that Black people are victims of a numbers game. Rather, there has been a wholesale P.R. campaign on the part of those on the right to associate all public goods and services, from public schools to public assistance, with the bodies of undeserving people of color, particularly Blacks and Latinos.

Any discussion of welfare or public assistance in this country is rife with dog whistles from the right toward the lower elements of their base, who in Pavlovian fashion, respond to code words about welfare and public assistance by conjuring images of the undeserving Black and Brown poor. In his new book “How Propaganda Works,” Yale philosopher Jason Stanley argues that while a “liberal democratic culture… does not tolerate explicit degradation of its citizens,” there are “apparently innocent words that have the feature of slurs, namely that whenever the words occur in a sentence, they convey the problematic content. The word welfare …conveys a problematic social meaning.” I am suggesting that the word “public” in our political discourse is becoming just such a tool of political propaganda as well.

While we don’t explicitly degrade public institutions, those institutions are, in practice, seen as less valuable, worthy, rigorous, and prestigious. In places as disparate as New York City and Tuscaloosa, Alabama, the problem of severe segregation in public schools has been well-documented. When economic means permit, white families tend not to educate their children in racially diverse schools. Public schools are viewed as cauldrons of poor learning and social dysfunction; and white people, whenever possible, exercise the prerogative to keep their children out of these environments. That seems reasonable, but it is unreasonable to except that other people’s children should have to learn in these kinds of environments either. The current circus that is the education reform debate in this country demonstrates a point that Stanley makes: “The usurpation of liberal democratic language to disguise an antidemocratic managerial society is at the basis of the American public school system as it was restructured between 1910 and 1920.” In other words, we have a publicly stated belief in the importance of good public education to our democracy, but this masks a variety of ways in which public schools become tools of social control; and, in this moment in particular, that perpetuates the creation of a Black and Brown underclass.

 The tough reality about integration is white bodies are tethered to economic resources. Schools that have large populations of white children are not failing schools. When white gentrifiers move into urban areas, they seemingly bring nice restaurants, better policing, and better schools with them. The narrative attached to Black bodies is the opposite. The presence of Black bodies are seen as a drain on resources, particularly since the presence of Black people in neighborhoods tends to make those neighborhoods less desirable, driving down property values. One recent expose about racist housing practices in Brooklyn demonstrated that white people routinely ask not to live in places with too many Black people.

To the extent that our Civil Rights-era narrations of the racial divide persist, it seems that neither Black people nor white people ever invested fully in the idea of integration. Black communities in some respects fared better under segregation, because there were Black-owned business, students taught by Black teachers who believed in their inherent capability to learn, and more class integration within Black neighborhoods. Still, this was an inherently limited universe for many Black people. Thus, they aspired to white institutions and to racial integration in some ways as a means of access to a fairer redistribution of resources. Separate, Civil Rights era activists concluded, was inherently unequal.

Meanwhile, white people both then and now never fully bought into the idea of racial integration either. Beyond sentiment and rhetoric, we have only to look at the idea of racial integration in practice.  If schooling, housing, and worship practices in the 21st century are any indicator, we are as segregated as ever, and that has everything to do with a continuing practice among white Americans to segregate where they live, raise families and send their children to school. While many young white gentrifiers tell themselves they are chasing culture and diversity, in many ways, they are simply re-segregating neighborhoods, by shifting the color of who lives there from Brown to white. What gentrifiers seem not to have figured out is that they are being eaten alive by their own system, because their white bodies drive up property values and then price them out of the very neighborhoods they want to live in.

Moreover, white people continue to suggest that it is Black people who are self-segregating. They ask, “Why are all the Black kids sitting together in the cafeteria?” Or as one severely misguided senior professor at Duke University recently suggested, Black people’s choice of ethnic names is evidence of a lack of desire to fully integrate or assimilate into the mainstream of American society.

 I am pointing to these practices in this larger argument about the way the notion of “public” has become a tool of propaganda in order to suggest a couple of things: One, racialized practices and racism still occur even when there is no identifiable racial discourse being deployed. And, two, these examples suggests that racialized bodies are tethered to material resources. So when the right argues that we privatize each and every facet of American life, this is at base about an attempt to segregate resources. But it is not accounted for by a purely Marxist analysis, which would suggest that this was about class and not race. In this country, our class structure is tethered to a racialized hierarchy, in which Black people in particular exist as a perpetual underclass.

A hallmark of American democracy has been an investment in a robust form of public life, good public schools, sufficient public services, active participation in our democracy. But we are a country where a significant segment of our citizenry has always been perfectly willing to erode long-held democratic principles in service of maintaining a racial hierarchy. The Civil War is only the most extreme example.

As those on the right bellyache about the cultures of poverty that cause Black folks to rely too heavily on government, no one ever seems to admit that there has never been any possibility of Black freedom or equal opportunity in this country without strong federal government intervention. Black people have a long history of working in government because the federal government was the first place to call for mass desegregation of employment opportunities.  In fact, the first March on Washington Movement, begun in 1941 by Pullman Porter A. Philip Randolph, was designed to force Franklin D. Roosevelt to desegregate federal employment in all federal agencies and among those who had federal contracts. In 1942, FDR obliged Randolph rather than risk a march on Washington, by creating the Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC).

Combatting racial segregation, and the racialized segregation of resources, has only happened in this country with strong federal intervention. So when the right continues to weaken federal government on all matters related to the social safety net, they deliberately rollback the pathways by which African Americans have procured access to middle class.

In 2013, the median net wealth for a white family was $142,000. The median net wealth for a Black family was $11,000. Black families have lost more than half their collective net wealth since 2008. As we are continually confronted with the stark and continuing reality of a rapidly disappearing Black middle class, while politicians continue to speak in “efficient” terms about the need to shrink government, it’s hard not to conclude that this was the goal all along.

 

Source: Salon

Brittany Cooper

620 412 admin5

Horrifying Image Shows Disgraced Chicago Police Officers Posing With Black Man Wearing Antlers

A recently released photo shows two officers acting as if they hunted and shot an unidentified man

2015/5/27-A grotesque image recently made public by a Cook County judge shows two former Chicago police officers holding rifles and posing next to an unidentified black man, who is shown wearing fake deer antlers and sticking his tongue out, as if he had been hunted and killed.

According to the Chicago Sun-Times, the Chicago Police Department requested that the racially charged photo, which shows former officers Timothy McDermott and Jerome Finnigan standing over the man, remain sealed in court documents. Judge Thomas Allen, however, denied the request in March, after police Supt. Garry McCarthy moved to fire McDermott. He has since been removed from the force, but appealed his dismissal earlier this year.

Via the Sun-Times:

“Believed to have been taken in a West Side police station between 1999 and 2003, the Polaroid photo was given to the city by the feds in 2013 and resulted in McDermott, a clout-heavy cop, being fired last year by the police board in a 5-to-4 vote. The four dissenters said McDermott should only have been suspended. But a majority of the board wrote that “appearing to treat an African-American man not as a human being but as a hunted animal is disgraceful and shocks the conscience.” […]

Federal prosecutors gave the photo to police investigators in 2013 about two years after Finnigan — the notorious other cop in the picture — was sentenced to 12 years in prison for leading a crew of rogue cops in robberies, home invasions and other crimes.”

Law enforcement officials have condemned the photo, which appears publicly for the first time amidst overwhelming tension between police departments and communities of color across the country. In Chicago, police officers came under fire earlier this year for allegedly operating “black sites” across the city, where suspects and witnesses were reportedly held for extended periods of time without public records and likely in violation of their constitutional rights.

McCarthy has reportedly enforced new measures to improve community relations, and told the Sun-Times the picture is “disgusting, and the despicable actions of these two former officers have no place in our police department or in our society.”

“I fired one of the officers and would have fired the other if he hadn’t already been fired by the time I found out about the picture,” McCarthy said. “Our residents deserve better than this, as do the thousands of good men and women in this department.”

Neither the Chicago police bureau nor the FBI have been able to identify the African-American man in the photograph, for whom McDermott and Finnigan never filed an arrest report. Both officers admitted to appearing in the picture, however, with Finnigan describing the decision to take it as “spur of the moment.” He also claimed to have released the man without arresting him, after discovering he had no serious criminal background.

McDermott’s attorney, Daniel Herbert, has attempted to use the man’s lack of identification to his client’s benefit. In his closing arguments at the former officer’s police board hearing, Herbert claimed that without more information, there is no way to assume the photo was taken without consent.

“What’s to say this individual wasn’t performing at a Christmas pageant in the district and was dressed as a reindeer and had taken the reindeer suit off?” Herbert said. “Again, I don’t mean to make preposterous arguments, but the charges in this case, they warrant that.”

McDermott’s next appeal hearing is in June.

 

Source: Salon

Jenny Kutner

590 405 admin5

Georgia Justice

The Supreme Court will review a case of blatant racism by prosecutors. For once, there’s a paper trail.

Caption:Prosecutors highlighted each black prospective juror’s name in green and wrote that the green highlighting “represents blacks.”

2015/5/27-The prosecutors seeking to send Timothy Tyrone Foster to death row went about their job in a curious manner. During jury selection, they highlighted each black prospective juror’s name in green—on four different copies of the jury list—and wrote that the green highlighting “represents blacks.” On each black juror’s questionnaire, prosecutors circled the response “black” next to a question about race. They also referred to three black jurors as “B#1,” “B#2,” and “B#3” in their notes. Finally, the prosecution’s investigator ranked each black juror against the others—in case “it comes down to having to pick one of the black jurors.”

The prosecutors struck each black candidate, one by one, from the jury pool until none remained.

At the end of the trial, prosecutors asked the jury to impose the death penalty on Foster, to “deter other people out there in the projects.” The all-white jury convicted Foster of murder and sentenced him to death.

Foster, a black man, appealed his conviction to the Georgia Supreme Court. Striking black jurors on account of their race is unconstitutional, and Foster believed he deserved a new trial. But the Georgia Supreme Court rejected his claim. Prosecutors had not “demonstrated purposeful discrimination” in striking black jurors, the court held. There was no racial bias in the prosecution of Timothy Tyrone Foster. His execution could move forward.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court announced it will review the Georgia Supreme Court’s decision. The case, Foster v. Humphrey, gives the justices a chance to correct a gross miscarriage of justice—the insidious racism that so often infects the prosecution of black defendants. A victory for Foster could put a dent in the kind of misconduct that unscrupulous prosecutors use to put black defendants behind bars.

A victory for Georgia, however, would be a huge setback for the criminal justice system. It could give prosecutors across the country free rein to employ the kind of warped Southern justice that helped send Foster to death row.

The Supreme Court articulated the current standard governing jury selection in the 1986 case Batson v. Kentucky. The court held that attorneys for both the prosecution and the defense may make a certain number of “peremptory challenges”—that is, they can strike prospective jurors during voir direwithout giving a cause. However, prosecutors may not strike jurors on account of their race. Such race-based strikes, the court held, violate the defendant’s constitutional guarantee of equal protection, and undermine “public confidence in the fairness of our system of justice.” (Since then, the court has alsobarred sex discrimination during jury selection, and the 9th Circuit has barred sexual orientation discrimination as well.)

But Batson has a problem. After the defendant has claimed the prosecution struck a juror on account of his race, the prosecution can put forward a race-neutral explanation for its decision. Then the trial judge must decide whom to believe. Higher courts must show “great deference” for the trial judge’s decision on any Batsonchallenge. In practice, this rule means that prosecutors can usually toss out some pretext for striking a black juror. And if the trial judge buys it, the defendant must prove to an appeals court—sometimes years later—that the prosecutor’s pretext masked a racist mindset.

Because it’s so difficult to prove a state of mind, the Supreme Court has gradually allowed judges to look for clues that prosecutors struck jurors on account of their race. In one case out of Texas, the court cried foul when prosecutors used their peremptory strikes to exclude a stunning 91 percent of eligible black jurors at the trial of a black man. The court also noted some of the tricks the Texas prosecution used to keep blacks out of the jury. When a number of blacks sat toward the front of the room where the jurors were being chosen, for instance, the prosecutor “shuffled”—that is, rearranged where the candidates sat. Prosecutors usually evaluate potential jurors at the front of the jury panel first, so people toward the back are more likely to be dismissed. The prosecutor clearly shuffled the jury to move blacks from the front to the back. (Somehow, this is legal under Texas law.)

Even worse, the prosecution attempted to dupe black jurors into disqualifying themselves. When querying prospective jurors about their opinion on capital punishment, the prosecution phrased the question graphically to 53 percent of blacks. (The so-called graphic script involved an explanation that, if sentenced to death, the defendant would be “taken to the death house and placed on a gurney and injected with a lethal substance until he is dead.”) To 94 percent of whites, the prosecution said only that it was “actively seeking the death penalty.” Clearly, the prosecution hoped that blacks would reflect some ambivalence about capital punishment after hearing about the “death house”—at which point the prosecution could strike them for opposing the death penalty, not for being black.

In 2008, faced with indisputable evidence of prosecutorial racism hidden behind a patina of neutrality, the court gave Batson an update in Snyder v. Louisiana. Writing for the court, Justice Samuel Alito (yes, that Alito) wrote that defendants need only prove a peremptory strike was motivated “in substantial part by discriminatory intent.” In other words, racism didn’t need to be the sole factor behind the strike—just a major part of it. And Alito cracked down on the obvious pretenses prosecutors employ, allowing judges to critically analyze “suspicious” justifications for striking black jurors.

The justifications for striking every black juror from Foster’s trial aren’t merely suspicious. They’re laughable. For example, several black jurors were purportedly struck for having sons about Foster’s age, while white jurors with sons the same age were welcomed. And in light of the prosecution’s race-obsessed notes—which the trial court actually tried to keep secret—Foster should have a strong case at the Supreme Court.

But it’s disturbing to think about how many other black men currently sit behind bars because they couldn’t find a paper trail to prove their prosecutor’s racism. All-white juries are significantly more likely to convict black defendants than a jury with even one black person. Prosecutors know that. They also know that as long as they keep their racist strikes subtle, they’re unlikely to be found out—and that even if they are, they probably won’t face punishment. Foster was convicted in 1987; it took him nearly three decades bring his case to the Supreme Court. Racist prosecutors break the law, and the target of their lawlessness face execution. That’s Georgia justice in action.

 

Source: Slate

Mark Joseph Stern