Weeping Mothers

On Monday morning I talked with a client who was captured in Idaho after several days on the run. He allegedly killed his mother-in-law, father-in-law and stepson. After he hung up from me, he went back to his cell and tried to kill himself.

On Tuesday I argued a Motion For Post Conviction Relief that my client had a right to a new trial. Several years ago he went to a club with his friends. While he sat at a bar talking to a young lady, his friends got into a argument and almost came to blows with some other men in the bar. He and his friends then left the club. His friends returned within minutes of leaving and randomly opened fire. One of their bullets struck a innocent 19 year-old bystander killing him. My client was sitting in the car, while the shooting took place. His friends ran back to the car and what took place then is murky.

According to the State my client attempted to run over police officers who had arrived on the scene. According to my client the police randomly opened fire hitting him in the chest and almost killing him and it was only then when the car lounged forward. The State took my client to trial where he was represented by a Public Defender and was convicted of Second Degree Murder. The shooter hired a private attorney and was found guilty of manslaughter. My client was sentenced to life, the shooter got 15 years.

On Wednesday I argued for the life of two clients. One of them who was 35 years old was automatically given life as a third-time habitual offender. I had wept for him weeks earlier –I never weep after a trial- because I felt he was truly innocence of the charges, but my skills had fell short before the jury. There is no greater burden for a criminal defense lawyer than to have a client you believe to be innocent sitting in prison for life.

The other co-defendant was 25 years-old and facing a sentence of 20 to 60 years also as a habitual offender. I argued with passion to the judge not to “throw the young man away” – slang the young hoppers use for life in prison. I argued that 32 percent of young black men will come through the criminal justice system. That we lock up more of our citizens than any industrial nation in the world. I pleaded that I too was once headed for a life of crime, and only by luck did I escape the black man’s mark of carrying convicted felon for life. I argued with all my skills for the judge to give the young man 20 years and a chance at life after prison

The Judge listened patiently and when he began to speak, he acknowledged the power of my words and commended me on my good work at trial. He then recited that my client had been in the gangs since a pre-teen. He had been convicted of a sexual battery on a juvenile, and at trial he had been found guilty of standing on one of the busiest street corners in the city, at ten o’clock in the morning, and fired into a car to kill a useless soul named Donut. Donut wife was in the front passenger seat and his two year-old daughter was riding in the backseat. One of the bullets missed the two year-old head by two inches. The Judge then sentenced my client to 50 years.

A week earlier I had sit on the front porch of a mother and her family who had called me because several days before her son was caught coming out a furniture store at 3 am. The Police officer who had been staking out the store, reported that her son got into his car and tried to run him over. The officer allegedly fired six bullets into the vehicle killing her son. The police waited some 14 hours to notify her and when she arrived at the hospital her son was brain dead. Doctors told her that the fatal bullet was to the back of her son’s head, which would have meant that he was shot while fleeing the scene. The Officer who did the shooting had been involved in two other shootings one fatal and all three incidents allegedly involved a car being used as a weapon. Most police officers go their entire careers without firing their weapons. The Police Chief, who is black, within hours before the Department’s internal investigation had even begun declared the shooting was valid.

This is what I do. I work triage in a war. Only my emergency room is the court room and the wounded of this war are the young black men who are at war with themselves and each other. I rarely save the whole life. I try to turn life into 20 years, 20 years into five, five years into probation.

Over the years I have grown to fear these young men as my grandfather must have feared an encounter with the Klan on a dark highway fifty years ago.

Yet, much of my life the last ten years has been defending them. These young men are not born monsters. We- all of us- raise them to be. We allow their mothers to carry them without proper healthcare. We send them to school hungry and when they become distracted by the hunger in their bellies, or the chaos in their home life, we label them mentally deficient and warehouse them in Special Education. When they enter the Juvenile Justice System there is no real attempt at intervention to remedy the dysfunction that led them into the system in the first place. Instead we begin their rapid mental preparation to spend their lives as a convicted felon or at worst years in prison

While the corporate media is fixated over flags on lapels, or whether Jeremiah Wright loves America, or who loves Israel more, another black male child is being born to a teen-age mother fathered by a worthless soul, who like his father before him will never offer any emotional or financial support. The mother, who was born into dysfunction and will pass it on to the children, will do her best but the social and economic realities of being poor, black, a teenager, and with child will overwhelm her.

One day she will sit on a bench in the back of a court room and weep softly as a judge throws her child away. At the young age of 35 she will take the hand of her grandchild and walk onto the street, she will feel the warmth of the sun on her face and say a prayer in her heart that she will not lose this one.

That evening she will sit in front of her television and in another political race hear commentators ponder on why Candidate A cannot connect with “hard working white voters”. Tears will form in her eyes as she realizes the pains of her life, her children life, her grandchildren life have no place in America’s political dialogue.

What does it say about America that it will allow another generation to grow up in this madness? What does it say about our moral compass that a debate about who wears flag pins is more important than a debate about a genocide that is happening within our own cities?

Maybe history will prove Jeremiah Wright right that God Damns America. We have certainly dammed our inner-cities.