Thread by @socialistdogmom

the screening of part two of ava duvernay’s netflix miniseries about the central park five is starting at the jefferson school in a few minutes. after the screening, there will be another panel discussion.

https://twitter.com/socialistdogmom/status/1180924195682824196

part 2 of the series focused on the trial of the five boys wrongfully accused and convicted in the central park jogger case in 1989. the panel for this portion has a former judge, the current prosecutor, a defense attorney, the police chief, the city manager, & councilor bellamy

“it’s a very challenging series,” mayor walker says. “i’m trying to figure out how to breathe” after watching that portion of the series.

dr richardson, our still-new city manager, notes that the last time he was up on the stage at the jefferson school, he was interviewing for his current job. i don’t think i’ve heard him speak at length since then. he’s a man of few words at council meetings.

“i’ll be very candid - i didn’t want to do this,” wes bellamy says. he says he’s met three of the five exonerated men. “i know firsthand what it’s like to be beaten by the police, charged, told that you did something.”

wes says it’s traumatizing to watch, knowing how easily this could happen to boys he knows, how easily it did happen to him & his friends.

judge swett says he watched the entire miniseries twice prior to this panel. “it affected me on a number of different levels,” he says as a former judge “i was ashamed, i was angry, disappointed.” there were so many places where someone could’ve intervened.

“it amazes me that those convictions were upheld,” judge swett says of the central park jogger case. much of what happened “was blatantly illegal.”

“my hope is that we all learn that the criminal justice system is far from perfect,” judge swett says, but hopes that we don’t condemn the entire system for the acts of the few. wes, who is sitting next to him, bristles, and asks “few??”

judge swett is monologuing now about the kinds of diversionary programs that exist... mayor walker interjects, saying there will be time for that discussion later.
this panel is going to have some uncomfortable moments, i think.

police chief rashall brackney says she has written a paper on false confessions.
of the criminal justice system, “this whole system has a profound impact on black communities, poor communities,” and “there is often no way to recover.”

“how do we at least attempt to, we’re never going to get this perfect, probably never going to get this right,” but how do we start attempting to reform the criminal justice system? chief brackney asks.

“the criminal justice system was not put in place for black, brown, and poor people,” brackney says.

defense attorney (& my friend!) janice redinger says she was struck by the series’ depiction of these boys & their belief at the beginning that this process would arrive at the truth. she calls the system “fundamentally flawed.”

“it is a not a depiction of an outlier,” janice says. “there are all kinds of gradations of injustice” going on every day.

city commonwealth’s attorney joe platania said early in his career, he did some defense work for death row inmates.
“there is a tragic lack of humility in the criminal justice system,” he says quoting someone from the netflix series making a murderer.

dr richardson starts off by calling out judge swett. “to say that you can’t believe that an injustice occurred... injustice is occurring every day.”
he describes the kind of role playing he has to do with his children to keep them from getting killed by cops.

mayor walker transitions us to the next topic by reading a passage from michelle alexander’s the new jim crow.

the demeanor of the panelists who are black parents is markedly different from those who are not. this series is hard to watch. i can’t imagine watching it and seeing yourself and your children in those boys.

dr richardson says when he first considered the job here, he thought of “the cnn reports” and he “knew it was gonna be a challenge.” he took this job because he “wanted to make a difference.” (his callout of judge swett was good but i remain skeptical of our new city manager)

joe platania moved here a year after graduating law school to work in the public defender’s office. he recalls his younger self having faith in the justice system & his clients looking at him “like i was insane,” and now says he was naive then.

janice has been practicing law since 1988, having read the law (a VA quirk that allows you to become a lawyer without going to law school) under a civil rights attorney.

“i came into the system knowing that there was injustice & ready to fight it,” janice says. “i’ve been fighting it for 30 years and i don’t know that i’ve made any difference.”

“i was born into a system of injustice,” chief brackney says. growing up in pittsburgh, “i was exposed very early to what injustice looks like.”
she talks about police brutality against men “who looked just like my brothers.”

“when i moved here to charlottesville, it really was a smack,” chief brackney says. she’s very offended at the community’s perception that the police department is a white supremacist organization, specifically citing the “cops & klan” chant.

“my experience professionally, which i think is what you asked about...,” judge swett says in what seems like a barb at panelists who had spoken instead about their personal experiences.

when swett became a judge, he had no experience with criminal law (that seems unusual?). he says he quickly realized “the criminal justice system was in an upheaval” because of the crack cocaine epidemic.

“there had to be a response to that that went beyond individual cases,” swett says. “what can we do at the beginning of the case, rather than at the end?” as a judge, he only saw the very end of a longer process.

swett talks about the drug court - a program that allows people to avoid conviction of they complete a treatment program.
i think maybe he needs a time limit. he’s monologuing again and it has a distinctly paternalistic tone.

“unless we all participate, unless we listen to those who have other views, unless we look to a higher being...” judge swett has lost the thread and someone needs to take the mic from him.

to swett’s comment, wes says the idea that if we just look to a higher being, if we come together and sing kumbaya, if we just hope things are gonna get better...
“we must admit that we live in a racist society and the criminal justice system is racist.”

“there is no higher power that is going to stop the white supremacy in people’s hearts,” wes says. there are real people involved handing out disproportionate sentences to people who look like him.

wes tells a story of a time he was pulled over in charlottesville -
“there’s nothing you can do or pray to” to change the way the criminal justice system treats you.

“there was nothing i could have done to prevent that,” wes says about a clerical error that resulted in him missing a court date, a capias being issued, and him being booked.
he’s speaking directly to swett now.
“i’ve had my ass beaten by police officers. literally beaten.”

“there was literally nothing i could have done to prevent that,” wes says again and again, recounting encounters he’s had with police looking for a reason to harass a young black man.

“i dressed like this today for a reason,” wes says, gesturing at his black hoodie. “an encounter can go down any way they want it to,” he says of a police officer who would judge him for his appearance.

“black folk, we have to make sure that in every encounter we have with the police, that we get home safe,” wes says. “we have to protect and serve our own,” “train ourselves, teach ourselves, protect ourselves.”

“we can’t do anything together until we admit that the game is rigged,” wes says in response to swett’s come together narrative about criminal justice reform.

when mayor walker was a little girl, the police raided her aunt’s apartment. she recalls seeing the guns. at a hearing later, a judge called her cousin “garbage.” her relatives were “not afforded the privilege of being victims” of a drug epidemic, but treated as criminals.

she has worked at region ten as a substance abuse counselor. she recalls that everyone involved knew that JADE had planted informants in their drug court treatment program.

mayor walker asks her teenage son to stand up. he’s in the back of the room, wearing a hoodie. she turns to judge swett and says “trayvon got murdered for walking around like that.”
she is tearing up describing her fear since tamir rice’s murder.

“the system doesn’t need to kill us with a bullet to the head,” because it has already destroyed their families emotionally and economically with incarceration, mayor walker says.

mayor walker is referring now to this 2015 article about a proposed partnership between our local jail & the GEO group
dailyprogress.com/news/local/cha…

mayor walker directs a question to commonwealth’s attorney joe platania and police chief brackney about police misconduct and bad convictions, referring to the situation in baltimore that has resulted in hundreds of vacated convictions
cnn.com/2019/10/04/us/…

chief brackney says she was recently at a conference called “reimagining justice” and she was one of only two people there who were law enforcement professionals (who let a cop come to an event like that?!)

“true diversion does not occur once you’ve arrested someone,” brackney says. once you’ve introduced someone into the criminal justice system, those diversion programs are just massaging feelings of guilt felt by those in the system.

brackney talk about the need to institute permanent reforms - elected & appointed officials come and go.

“the commonwealth’s attorney and i have a commitment that we will not do harm to this community,” says police chief brackney, who doesn’t appear to realize she’s lying.

platania says the mayor’s question really calls for a long & detailed discussion of proposals, but we’re running out of time.
“it’s not helpful when prosecutors have a hammer think everything is a nail,” “it’s very destructive,” he says.

“there are people who, and i’m not going to apologize for this, do present a danger to this community and need to be prosecuted,” platania says, but only a minority of offenders really need to be locked away.

mayor walker asks janice what she, as a defense attorney, would do to change every aspect of the criminal justice system.
“JADE needs to go,” janice says. while no city cops are currently assigned to the task force, it’s still active within the city.

janice says the city could refuse to prosecute any case generated by the JADE task force. “just simply not prosecute those offenses.”
this could be extended to the decision not to prosecute a defendant in any case where there was police abuse.

“as long as police have discretion,” there will be abuse of that discretion. and that disproportionately affects black and brown people, janice says.

janice goes on to say that the prosecutor could opt not to prosecute in any case where charges stem from a traffic stop that is clearly pretextual (brake light out resulting in a drug charge, etc)

janice urges people to go to court and see what happens. public defenders are severely overburdened, some of them with 150 open cases, resulting in what she calls “assembly line lawyering” which is in her opinion “malpractice per se”

no one piece of this system operates in a vacuum, janice says. people who drop out of school are more likely to commit crimes. young black kids who never have a black teacher are more likely to drop out.

if a black child goes to a school where other students are allowed to wear anti-black hate symbols, they won’t feel safe. they are more likely to drop out. she says things like banning hate symbols in schools is a criminal justice issue.

janice: “the vast majority of people who go to prison come out of prison,” and they come out having lost their jobs, their communities. they come out less likely to be able to succeed in society. “it’s a bad system.”

we ran out of time & won’t be able to get to any audience questions, unfortunately. some people are pretty upset about this.

we’re actually watching parts 2 & 3 of the miniseries today. part 3 is starting now & there will be another panel afterwards. i believe mayor walker said last week this panel will be made up of formerly incarcerated men, but i could be misremembering.

part three of the miniseries shows the boys’ families struggling with their incarceration & their difficulties re-entering society after being released.
due to some scheduling issues, this panel is just 2 people.

“i could really hear the different worlds that people are in,” says the first man about what he heard from the first panel. “something he said was crazy,” he says about judge swett’s comments.

the second panelist founded a nonprofit that teaches black youth entrepreneurship in an effort to combat the school to prison pipeline.

“once you get into the system, if you don’t have a strong support system” “they pretty much got you,” he says about the way people get trapped in the criminal justice system.

“they put these labels on you,” says the first panelist. because of his felony conviction, he can’t get any kind of tuition assistance to go back to school.

he talks about the roots of the prison industrial complex in the united states as an outgrowth of the abolition of slavery - it was a way to maintain that source of free labor.

he talks about the role of the criminal justice system in gentrification - the crack epidemic put so many black people in jail, destroying families & ruining people economically. the neighborhood he grew up in is almost entirely white now.

“i know how we can fix it,” he says. he says if all the white people who care about black people & all the black people just didn’t go to work for a week, “it’d fix every problem we ever had.”

the second panelist says that despite his college education, he has been rejected from jobs he’s qualified for because of his past incarceration.
“the number one cause of recidivism is people who don’t have a support system to come home to”

“any decision that you make can result in you being labeled as a felon,” he says. “some of us make it out, some of us don’t.”

mayor walker asks them how hopeful they feel about the future of black children and black families in our community. panelist 2 says he’s very hopeful, that he sees the black community coming together, “all we have is us.”

panelist 1 says he feels hopeful, but seems more hesitant with his hope.

mayor walker again drives home the point that the difference between the criminalization of the crack epidemic and the public health crisis of the opioid epidemic is race.

“i would ask them to try to put themselves in the people they are prosecuting’s place,” says panelist 2 in response to mayor walker’s question about what they’d like to tell the people in power in the criminal justice system.

“a lot of times the commonwealth attorney, the chief of police, they’re not actually having direct conversations” with the people whose lives they are upending, he says.

panelist 1 says a conversation with the criminal justice system may be pointless, “jail is not about rehabilitation, it’s about money.”
“when they police us, it creates jobs, it creates money.” the carceral system is a whole industry.

“i hope this is just the beginning of a very long process & discussion,” mayor walker says.

it’s been a long one today (five hours!) but i’m very grateful to our mayor for putting on this program.