Rigged Legal System

Search words: Rigged Legal System, Gauntlet of oppression, racial profiling throughout 

Years ago on jury duty, I was asked to render a ‘fair and impartial’ judgement regarding a young Black man accused of possession on the Upper East Side.

There were only two Black people on the jury, myself and another dude. After a very long time, we ended up finding the defendant guilty. That’s the end of the story but not the narrative.

The twelve main things I came to realize:

1. Several Black potential jurors were citing a mantra about their unwillingness to participate in a prejudiced judicial system. It was my first time hearing it but should I be called again, I’ll google it and voice my objection in the same way.

2. The suspect was stopped for a broken taillight, but as his wife said when she examined their car at the station, the light was never broken.

3. The white judge, however, ruled that the bust was still legit even though he was clearly stopped for driving while Black.

4. In my life so far, I’ve been accosted by police and security a total of 9x combined.

They list stop and frisk for us at 88% but the truth is that it’s rare for Black men like myself to have the number of harassments below the double digits. I know. I’ve checked around.

Mostly it’s due to my not driving and my behaving as though I’m living in a sundown town. Never having smoked a cigarette (let alone other substances) also helps. 

Even so, I’ve been approached by cops for things like walking our son to grandma’s after picking him up from school and have had the cops called on me for doing laundry in our own building!

5. The man was arrested after being illegally (just because the white judge ruled the illegal cause ‘legal’ doesn’t make it so) stopped for not having his license and registration handy.

6. This is how they get us. We’re 12% of the population who commit 12% of the crime. But if you profile us, you’re sure to get much of that 12% criminal element. And then media-blitzing takes over by broadcasting that 12%, 90% of the time reinforcing the conditioning.

While the criminal element in the white majority either have to be very stupid or extremely unlucky to do ANY jail time.

And that’s just one way how a small percentage of the population can fill up 40% of our prisons.

Exactly how stupid or unlucky do white people have to be to do time? 

Zimmermann murdered Trayvon with a gun. Trayvon called his best friend and told her that some ‘cracker-assed cracka’ was following him [later we found out ‘stalking’ against police orders who told him to stand down].

There was audio recorded of Trayvon screaming H.E.L.P!!!

The coroner of 19years determined that Trayvon did not engage in any life threatening ‘ground n pound’ [in other words, he did not fight back while screaming for aid against the man pointing the gun] according to the forensic evidence.

So stupider and unluckier than George here. Audio and forensics isn’t enough to charge a white man who murders a Black one. There needs to be video. [But if Trayvon had somehow managed to tussle with the gun and Kill George, he’d still be in jail for manslaughter!]

And even that is no longer enough in most cases as a majority of the hashtags are caught on tape and the white killer STILL goes free.

Even so, both former President Jimmy Carter and Colin Powell weighed in in Zimmermann’s favor with ‘rule of law’ and ‘ground n pound’ which leads to my next point:

7. While cops and security were profiling those Black Like Me on campus, two white dudes that I know later told me that their selling drugs paid their way through college and they were NEVER STOPPED ONCE!

8. Then the privilege loopholes for those both stupid enough and unlucky enough to get jailed are ginormous!

Not to mention that white convicts do better in job hunts than Black college grads.

9. A young white woman juror screamed out at one point towards the end that one of her good friends overdosed and that someone should pay.

Any one of these from the broken taillight that wasn’t broken to to the outburst of this tainted juror along with other discrepancies would have been enough to get the case tossed if they were white.

Not to mention, it was the dude’s first offense, which brings up the next point:

10. In THE NEW JIM CROW by Michelle Alexander, she writes about how cops don’t usually frame those with no record but ‘flake’ those with a legal history to make their bones.

And how the overwhelming majority of those cases are plead out.

And that’s how we get Black men exonerated after being on death row for decades DECADES who weren’t even at the scene of the crime!

But this is not the true horror:

11. The worst EVIL comes from well meaning folk like the white judge who ignores the ‘rule of law’ for the Black defendant while upholding it for the white one all while seeing nothing askew.

It’s folk like you who make excuses, condoning the injustice by your silence, all while vilifying those of us who speak out as harsh, rude, overreacting and too involved or emotional to judge with impartiality.

It’s folk like me who are slow to learn and even slower to believe when we hear about the full mechanizations of racism and its spider’s web. 

And when we do, we deny what needs to be done: FIRE THE WHITE COPS FROM ELSEWHERES who are the arms and legs of racist oppression. 

Can’t wait ‘til we have our own media. Everything changes.