An East Coast professor who specializes in police studies was kind enough to write in response to the introductory edition of Drunk & Disorderly that I send folks new to the newsletter.
One of the articles in it, “First…Kill All the Black Men,” talks about the struggle some police officers over the years have had in bringing black males of almost any age to justice without killing them first. Among the (some would say assassinated) men and boys mentioned there are Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri, Eric Garner of New York City, and twelve-year-old Tamir Rice of Cleveland.
The professor said there are many reasons to question police killings of Black men, but that I should look at Pulitzer Prize-winning opinion writer Jonathan Capehart’s article, “‘Hands Up Don’t Shoot’ Was Built on a Lie,” before I use the Michael Brown shooting as an example.
My own education was mostly out West, and I’ve been told schools out here ain’t quite as smart as the Ivys and such. So whenever I get some advice from anyone anywhere near the Ivys, I tend to take note.
And after reading the Capehart piece, and the U.S. Department of Justice Report it was based on, which came out seven months after the Brown shooting (three months after I’d written about it), I see that the professor has a point. You’ll see it too if you click on the links in that last sentence.
The second link is to an official government report, and government reports can be persuasive, if sometimes built backwards, starting with a conclusion that then looks for facts to support that conclusion.
Still, I’m inclined to believe this one.
But then comes along another white cop to kill another unarmed black man last March, Daniel Prude of Rochester, New York. We know Daniel was unarmed because police body cam footage shows him lying naked and handcuffed in the street under lightly falling snow, in obvious mental distress. His distress turns physical after the cops slip a white mesh hood over his head, pin him to the frozen asphalt and lean into his head till he stops talking, stops moving, stops…everything. And another grand jury says yes there’s harm, but no foul. I’m not sure I saw the cops in that video show any obvious bias toward a black man; I’m not sure I saw them treat him, as a man.
I like to keep an open mind. But every time I hear a grand jury like this one yesterday, or read a government report, that says it’s okay to stick a bag over a black guy’s head and keep it there till he stops breathing, my mind moves just a little further from government reports.
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
I don’t care about the tax crimes of the former guy who used to be president of the United States, any more than I care about the size and shape of his tiny little Stormy Daniels fan club member. So I wasn’t that excited when the Supreme Court, in a one-sentence order today, threw his “under audit” IRS returns into the same imaginary category as his Vietnam bone spurs.
They are maybe the least of his crimes and anatomical peculiarities anyway, even though he spread so many of them around and inflicted them on so many.
I do care about the greatest of his crimes, his last as president. I believe he should be held accountable for it — not by conviction after impeachment from an office he’d already been kicked out of, or by even tamer Congressional censure. He should be held accountable by a federal criminal court. Because on 6 January Donald Trump committed treason against the United States of America.
Treason is defined by the Constitution itself as levying war against the United States. He summoned to Washington an army of Proud Boys, Confederate fancy pants, and other impressionable idiots, fanned a fury already stoked by months of lies he told about the election, and set loose those dogs to tear the Capitol apart in hopes they would at least stop the vote count. If they had to kill a few Congress members, maybe hang a vice president to do it, well, he did fancy himself a wartime president.
One of the last of his endlessly graceless acts was to bring back federal executions — with an enthusiasm that fast-tracked thirteen lives including one just five days before he laid his last slime trail back to Mar-a-Lago. There hadn’t been a federal execution in seventeen years before Trump turned full Sweeney Todd his last year in office, overseeing more of them than any president in more than one hundred twenty years.
Turns out the first enumerated U.S. Code punishment for treason is death.
A professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice wrote to tell me I might want to publish a toolkit on virtual justice that her research team at Incarceration Nations Network (INN) has released. Baz Dreisinger (John Jay likes to call her “Dr. Baz”), when she’s not directing traffic at the intersection of race, crime, culture, and justice, is founder and executive director of the joint. INN works for prison reform at other joints all over the world.
I’m not sure I have the technology to publish the toolkit, but I can certainly point you to it.
There are actually two toolkits available right now.
The first addresses the issue of criminal justice in the age of Covid. Justice is slow, sure, but viral infection threatens to kill it altogether. INN offers a six-point plan to mitigate the harm being done to due process (speedy trial for example), such that justice might function at all.
Also available is a toolkit that addresses virtual education behind bars during the pandemic, and after. If you believe in redemption, and preserving that which may be redeemed, have a look.
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
He didn’t kill somebody on Fifth Avenue in New York, and he didn’t kill just one.
Donald Trump killed six people on First Street in Washington, and many in the Republican Congress, once they stopped pissing their pants and came out of hiding from the wildling thugs Trump sent to kill them, don’t care.
They don’t have the guts to care, because they fear Donald Trump more than they fear the God they pretend to worship. They don’t have the guts to care, any more than they care about the criminally negligent homicide Trump committed in killing hundreds of thousands of Americans to protect his failed bid for a second term as America’s worst president.
Never mind Trump stood at the Ellipse on 6 January and urged an angry mob to march to the Capitol and take back a stolen election.
Never mind he said “and I’ll be there with you.” (He wasn’t, of course: bone spurs.)
Never mind he said you’ll never take back our country with weakness, you have to be strong, you have to “fight like hell” to force the Congress to throw out the election. “Fight like hell” wasn’t a call to debate; it was a call to decapitate our democracy.
Never mind he was delighted to hear chants of “hang Mike Pence” or that people wanted to put a bullet through Nancy Pelosi’s head.
Never mind that he spent more than a year building the Big Lie that the only way he could lose is if the election was rigged, and when he did lose goaded the mob to take it back by force.
Nearly a year and a half before, Donald Trump stood on another patch of grass, the White House South Lawn, and said, “I’m a very honest guy.”
Honest? Honest?
Trump told thirty thousand five hundred seventy-three lies as President of the United States. His lie that the election was stolen — a lie he used to incite carnage in the capital, six dead, nearly one hundred forty cops injured, one losing an eye, one impaled with a metal fence stake, several with brain injuries, others with crushed spinal discs or cracked ribs — was only his biggest.
In our mythology the first American president could never bring himself to tell even a single lie; the sixteenth’s Christian name is always preceded by “Honest.”
[Editor’s Note: Paul Magnarella is professor emeritus at the University of Florida who has worked with the United Nations Criminal Tribunals. He is a lawyer who for years tried to overturn what he says was the wrongful conviction of a member of the Black Panther Party who fled the United States and has lived in exile in Tanzania for fifty years. He generously offers here a taste of that tale, fully digested in his newest book, “Black Panther in Exile: The Pete O’Neal Story.”]
“We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of Black people.”
This demand did not follow the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police on May 25, 2020. Rather it preceded that horrific event by over 50 years; it was Point 7 of the Black Panther Party’s 1967 Ten Point Program.
During the summer of 1967, over 100 US cities erupted into violence, fueled by pent-up resentments in urban black communities over police brutality and other forms of racial injustice. In response, President Lyndon B. Johnson authorized a blue-ribbon commission to investigate the causes of the urban upheavals and to offer recommendations. The resulting March 1968 report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, known as the Kerner Commission, concluded that the country was “moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal.” Unless conditions were remedied, the commission warned, the country faced a system of apartheid in its major cities. The Kerner Commission urged legislation to promote racial integration and to enrich inner cities, primarily through job creation, job-training programs, and decent housing. The report also recommended that municipal governments hire more diverse and sensitive police. But just as the report highlighted the inequality experienced by urban blacks and pointed to police brutality as a main cause of the uprisings, the Johnson administration ignored its recommendations and doubled down on a law-and-order agenda.
Felix “Pete” O’Neal, the main subject of “Black Panther in Exile,” grew up in a country that disadvantaged its black inhabitants, first as slaves and then as citizens. Pete spent his youth and young adult years in an impoverished, racially segregated section of Kansas City, Missouri. Growing up during the height of America’s civil rights era, he experienced and witnessed the kind of police brutality that was reserved for the underprivileged.
Kansas City, Missouri, in the 1960s resembled the apartheid situation depicted by the Kerner Report. Racial integration at any level was rare. Neither the city’s prestigious social clubs nor the important trade associations had a single black member in 1968. Black males on average earned 20 percent less than their white counterparts, and about 20 percent of blacks with an elementary-school education were unemployed. The racial inequalities in urban housing, education, and employment were paralleled by racial inequalities in arrests, incarceration rates, and deaths due to police actions.
When poor, disadvantaged people break the law out of economic desperation, comfortable middle-class society often faults them for “making bad choices.” In reality, these people had too few “right choices.” Owing to structural racism, the number of realistic opportunities available to many of the underprivileged fell grossly short of their needs.
Pete was fourteen years old when the US Supreme Court held that racial discrimination in public schools was unconstitutional (1954). He was twenty-seven when the Supreme Court finally invalidated apartheid laws that criminalized interracial marriages (1967). That was followed in 1968 by the assassination of Martin Luther King by a white racist. One year later, O’Neal joined the Black Panther Party, becoming deputy chairman and founder of its Kansas City Chapter. Pete and his fellow Panthers initiated free breakfast programs for inner city youths, free clothing and free medical care for the needy. They also monitored police patrols in the black neighborhoods, hoping to prevent police brutality towards residents.
Pete soon became a victim of the government’s unconstitutional electronic surveillance and a target of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agents, local police, and the FBI’s COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program), which was designed to destroy the Black Panther Party. On October 30, 1969, ATF agents arrested O’Neal, accusing him of having transported a shotgun across a state line some nine months earlier. After being convicted in a trial that involved judicial errors, serious constitutional rights violations, and perjury by key prosecution witnesses, and receiving threats on his life from local police, Pete and wife Charlotte fled to Algeria and then to Tanzania where they have lived ever since.
Many hundreds of Americans have called for O’Neal’s free return to the United States. As his attorney, I filed petitions with the US District Court in Kansas documenting the constitutional irregularities in Pete’s original trial and requesting a new, fair trial. Unfortunately, that court has refused to recognize its own errors and its mockery of justice. Consequently, O’Neal remains in Tanzania, unable to return to his country of birth, without going to prison for a wrongful conviction. He is one of the last Black Panthers in exile.
In Tanzania, Pete and Charlotte have called on the spirit of the Panther to record enormous achievements for the people of Tanzania and for non-Tanzanians whose lives they have touched. “Black Panther in Exile: The Pete O’Neal Story” weaves personal, historical, and legal stories together to show how the human spirit, even after being assaulted by the state establishment, can survive and flourish.