N.C. Attorney’s Tweetstorm Is Everything You Need To Know About What Is Wrong With Criminal Justice In America

By
Robert L. Franklin
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It’s no secret that the criminal justice system is a different beast depending on the color of your skin. Even in 2016, being black is as detrimental to a defendant’s case as whatever evidence the prosecutor presents to the jury.

North Carolina criminal defense attorney T. Greg Doucette is as astutely aware of the discrepancy as the general populous. The attorney, who also writes a legal blog, took to Twitter on Feb. 23 and bluntly offered his reflections on some of the more corrupted aspects of the American criminal justice system. In about 40 tweets, Doucette recalled a case in which he defended a 17-year-old black male charged with reckless driving, a Class 2 misdemeanor that carries a sentence of up to 60 days in jail, a 12-month driver’s license suspension, and a fine of up to $1,000.

It’s best to read about what happened straight from the man defending the defendant.

Allow me to interject for a moment, for attorney T. Greg Doucette just said something that should be clearly understood by everyone. Being aware of and mobilizing against acts of police brutality does not mean there is a “War on Cops.” The “War on Cops” has always been a flagrantly asinine talking point. While I’m not going to assume that 100% of the American populous does not have an anti-police sentiment, by and large, the reason why police action has been under scrutiny is because of certain police officers who abuse their authority and the capacity of their precinct.

No one has ever given a shit about Officer Friendly who writes parking tickets when he has to and is respectful to everyone he comes across. All the shits are given to cops like Eric Casebolt, the Georgia S.W.A.T. team that blew a whole in an infant’s chest with a stun grenade, and the North Port, Fla. K-9 unit.

I’m no math wiz, but I don’t think the marks on that narrow residential road are “clear 360 degree circles.”

Again, I’m no math wiz, but those appear to be sharp angles indicative of someone trying to not run over a freakin’ cat!

Could someone even achieve “clear 360 degree circles” on a road that thin?

The degree in which police officers commit perjury is hotly debated. In a 1996 Los Angeles Times article, then-San Jose Police Department chief Joseph D. McNamara said of police perjury, or “testilying”:

“Not many people took defense attorney Alan M. Dershowitz seriously when he charged that Los Angeles cops are taught to lie at the birth of their careers at the Police Academy. But as someone who spent 35 years wearing a police uniform, I’ve come to believe that hundreds of thousands of law-enforcement officers commit felony perjury every year testifying about drug arrests.

These are not cops who take bribes or commit other crimes. Other than routinely lying, they are law-abiding and dedicated. They don’t feel lying under oath is wrong because politicians tell them they are engaged in a “holy war” fighting evil. Then, too, the “enemy” these mostly white cops are testifying against are poor blacks and Latinos.”

If cops lie about drugs, who can rightly say they don’t lie about other things as well?

It’s also important to take a look at some police actions for what they are: “noble-cause corruption.” In Ethical Dilemmas and Decisions in Criminal Justice, attorney and professor Joycelyn M. Pollock cites a 2000 book by John P. Crank and Michael A. Caldero titled Police Ethics: The Corruption of Noble Cause, noting “the noble cause of police officers is ‘a profound moral commitment to make the world a safer place to live.'” Pollock elaborates by stating that “officers will do what it takes to get an offender off the street, even if it means employing a ‘magic pencil’ — that is, making up facts on an affidavit to justify a warrant or to establish probable cause for arrests.”

Now, throw everything in a blender. A black 17-year-old behind the wheel of a car, some trademark North Carolinian prejudices, A-Type personality police officers fighting a “noble cause,” and some skid marks on the road and you have a cocktail that tastes like a miscarriage of justice.

Criminal defense attorney T. Greg Doucette hit the nail on the head as far as how jacked the system is. We all know that the American criminal justice system is more akin to a Ford Edsel than a well-oiled machine. This isn’t to say that there aren’t times when the process works as it should and justice wins the day, but the flaws in the criminal justice system are well-studied, pretty obvious, and happen with stunning regularity.

But we depend on police for our safety, so society has a favorable bias when it comes to cops. For example, justifications for deadly force are all over the place and any guidelines that exist are, by and large, poorly enforced. While the public gets up in arms when police officers kill an unarmed individual, or kill anyone under sketchy circumstances, it appears that police departments, the very institutions that have taken oaths to protect and serve their people, are largely unconcerned. Ethics, if any, appear to be different depending on where they’re located, who’s on patrol, and shit, the temperature, maybe.

This is why a 12-year-old black boy with an airsoft gun in Cleveland, Ohio is killed by police officers just after their squad car comes to a stop and a Tennessee woman wearing body armor while shooting at passersby and police is taken in peacefully and without injury. This is why a young black man in Ohio — an “open carry” state — gets lit up by police while walking through a Wal-Mart with an airsoft rifle, but it’s perfectly acceptable for sketchy-looking white people to walk into a Dallas, Texas Chipotle restaurant like they’re grabbing a burrito in Fallujah.

The differences in these cases are that the people who were killed, Tamir Rice and John Crawford III, should not have been killed. But they were… because they were black. The criminal justice system is a different beast when you’re black and being black is almost like a charge in itself, compounding the additional charges in hundreds of thousands of dockets in thousands of jurisdictions from Boston to Los Angeles and everywhere in between, resulting in a disproportionate inmate population, a disproportionate subjection to poverty, and disproportionate disenfranchisement that over time cripples the desire to see change as broken spirits repeat “what’s the point?”

Police brutality doesn’t require a “hands up, don’t shoot” narrative or a hashtag or a bullet lodged in a vital organ or an assortment of billy-clubs cracking skulls. As criminal defense attorney T. Greg Docuette said above, police brutality also manifests as a police officer who knowingly commits perjury with the intention of putting a black 17-year-old male behind bars and kicking down the first domino in a vicious cycle that sees his life, and the lives of those around him, steadily screwed over by every system the United States has in place.

It’s a life sentence for a first offense and it happens all the time. Yet, we’re still stunned every time we hear about it.

Featured image is from the Open Clip Art Library, via Wikimedia Commons, available under a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.

Robert L. Franklin
Robert could go on about how he was raised by honey badgers in the Texas Hill Country, or how he was elected to the Texas state legislature as a 19-year-old wunderkind, or how he won 219 consecutive games of Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots against Hugh Grant, but those would be lies. However, Robert does hail from Lewisville, Texas, having been transplanted from Fort Worth at a young age. Robert is a college student and focuses his studies on philosophical dilemmas involving morality, which he feels makes him very qualified to write about politicians. Reading the Bible turned Robert into an atheist, a combative disposition toward greed turned him into a humanist, and the fact he has not lost a game of Madden football in over a decade means you can call him "Zeus." If you would like to be his friend, you can send him a Facebook request or follow his ramblings on Twitter. For additional content that may not make it to Liberal America, Robert's internet tavern, The Zephyr Lounge, is always open

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