I have a “what if?” to place on the table.
What if, as a part of the great American conversation, maybe even the 2020 presidential conversation, we decided to talk about something real. Something not wholly solvable but incredibly important. Like our criminal justice and prison systems.
What if, instead of fearing to discuss race honestly or posturing for each other on the subject, we tried, in a coalition of forces and visions, to fix something that is terribly broken?
The United States has the highest rate of incarceration in the world.
We have all heard and read that fact. But think about it. Higher than Cuba, China, Iraq or Syria?
We are the only country in the world that sentences minors to life in prison without parole.
One in 3 African American boys will likely be imprisoned in their lifetimes.
Whether you think ours is a racist nation or the least racist nation in the world today (my view); whether you favor reparations or think the idea madness, you can agree that our justice system is not just and our prison system utterly irrational, inhumane, and out of fiscal and managerial control.
Conservatives and liberals ought to be able to find common ground on this matter.
At where I go to church these days, a group of us are reading a book called “Just Mercy,” by a brave and brilliant lawyer and writer named Bryan Stevenson. The book is a story, partly about his growing up and partly about his founding of a law practice devoted to the most desperate people in the system.
It is also a book about Mr. Stevenson’s defense of a man on death row who was falsely accused, and wrongly, in every sense of the word, tried and eventually exonerated. His name was Walter McMillian. It happened partly because his skin was black and the victim was white. It happened also because he was a convenient foil.
And it is a book about our prison system and a trial system that often depends on deep pockets. What happens to African American men, especially the young ones, who find themselves in these systems isn’t pretty, isn’t justice and should not be America in 2019 and 2020.
We all know all of this.
And because we know all of this, it ought to be possible to get something done.
The Walter McMillian case was compelling. He was not only framed but sloppily, carelessly framed. And the frame was refuted by the defense. He was convicted anyway.
And then a judge decided, on his own, that Mr. McMillian should get the death penalty. All this happened in the Southern town where Harper Lee grew up. And, like the fictional but all too real “To Kill a Mockingbird,” the McMillian case should have shamed a town, a system and a nation.
When I was writing a metro column at The Blade, in Toledo, Ohio, some years ago, I became fascinated with the Danny Brown case — a case, in a way, even more incredible than Mr. McMillian’s.
It was really the Bobbie Russell case. She was brutally raped and murdered in Toledo in 1981. And Danny Brown was convicted based on the eyewitness account of a frightened and traumatized child — Bobbie’s son.
Danny did almost 20 years in prison — until DNA showed he was not the rapist (and the prosecution had always maintained the rapist and the killer were one). Danny was released from prison but given no official exoneration and no compensation for his loss of freedom and income, as is customary. The state now conveniently changed its theory of the murder: Maybe there were two men. But it did not pursue the theory. There was no new grand jury, no reopening of a very cold case, and no real official curiosity or remorse on the part of police and prosecutors.
The Bobbie Russell murder is unsolved to this day. No one seems to know how much of the original physical evidence exists or where. Another major suspect, long rumored and now in prison, has not been pursued in any meaningful way. And everyone in the system seems to have forgotten that in our country if it cannot be proven beyond a reasonable doubt that you are guilty, you are not guilty.
So, no justice for Bobbie Russell. No justice for Danny Brown. One life snuffed out. One ruined.
In this case, both the victim and the accused were African American. But Danny, like Mr. McMillan, was convenient. And everything about how this case was resolved, botched and then left to smolder and die, indicts the system. Yet no one in the system cared enough to clean up the mess they made.
Mr. Stevenson writes: “The opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice” — an interesting proposition.
And he writes of the thousands of wrongful convictions uncovered by the Innocence Project and others over the past 25 years.
We have to fix this. And an essential, if not total, fix is within our power.
Some years ago, I interviewed Ronald Cotton and Jennifer Thompson-Cannino, two people who had written a book about the flaws in eyewitness testimony. What was unusual is that they were accused and accuser. Ms. Thompson had identified Mr. Cotton as her rapist — picked him out of a lineup. Unlike the frightened little boy who identified Danny Brown, Ms. Thompson-Cannino was not coached.
Well, DNA proved her wrong. And after 10 years in prison, Mr. Cotton was set free. He and Ms. Thompson-Cannino formed a friendship, wrote a book together called “Picking Cotton,” and went on a national tour talking about what they had learned: The justice system is deeply flawed, with respect to eyewitness accounts, and deeply biased, on multiple levels, against the poor and people of color.
They took their pain and did something with it.
What if the nation did that?
Who is championing this issue today? Kanye West, the fresh Christian, and Donald Trump, the great disrupter.
What if Barack Obama joined Donald Trump and Colin Kaepernick joined Kanye West in the cause of prison reform?
OK, suppose Al Sharpton and Rand Paul joined hands?
Suppose the Democratic candidates for president, who all agree that the college kids should get tuition-free degrees and the pronouns of their choice, made time for a third of young black America behind bars.
If justice delayed is justice denied, then surely justice deferred indefinitely is the ultimate injustice. If the opposite of poverty is not wealth, but justice, we are a nation impoverished.
Keith C. Burris is executive editor of the Post-Gazette, and vice president and editorial director of Block Newspapers (kburris@post-gazette.com).
First Published: November 10, 2019, 11:00 a.m.
