Читать книгу Black Rage Confronts the Law - Paul Harris - Страница 10

To be black and conscious in

America is to be in a constant

state of rage.

—James Baldwin

Felicia Morgan was beaten at home by her parents and in the streets by strangers. She was raped at fourteen and robbed at gunpoint at fifteen. Her fear and anger began to devour her. At seventeen, Felicia took a gun and, with her eyes closed, put one bullet in the head of Brenda Adams. She was tried for robbery and murder in 1992 in a Milwaukee courtroom. Had her abusive childhood led to the homicide? Had growing up in a community devastated by poverty and racism shaped her criminal behavior? Black Rage Confronts the Law explores these questions as it shows the connection between a society infected by white supremacy and the crimes its citizens commit.

Black Rage Confronts the Law is about race, crime, and the legal system. It tells the story of men, women, and teenagers who have robbed banks and committed homicides. It is about trials in which defense lawyers have argued that their clients’ crimes were in part a product of societal racism. It is the first attempt to document and critique the black rage defense in American legal history.

Black rage and the black rage defense are not synonymous. Black rage, in its positive and negative aspects, is examined insightfully by psychiatrists Price Cobbs and William Grier in their widely discussed 1968 book Black Rage, The frustration and anger of African Americans and their consequences for this country are also articulated in James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. Black rage is eloquently expressed in the works of Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, and Walter Mosley. It is found in the poems of Gwendolyn Bennett, in the music of KRS-One, in the essays of bell hooks, in the speeches of Malcolm X, in the “Ten-Point Program” of the Black Panther Party, and in the very history of African Americans.

The black rage defense is a legal strategy used in criminal cases. It is not a simplistic environmental defense. The overwhelming majority of African Americans who never commit crimes and who lead productive lives against overwhelming odds prove that poverty and racial oppression do not necessarily cause an individual to resort to theft, drugs, and violence. But it cannot be denied that there is a causal connection between environment and crime. A black rage defense explores that connection in the context of an individual defendant on trial.

There has always been a strain in American jurisprudence which argued that the social and economic system must bear part of the responsibility for crime. Even the dominant legal philosophy, which perpetuates the myth that each person is free to act as he or she wishes, acknowledges that environmental conditions may lead to criminal behavior. Criminal law is based on the doctrine that the individual must be held responsible for his or her acts. But it has also reluctantly recognized that in cases where environmental factors do contribute to the crime, lawyers must be free to argue factors such as poverty and racism in defense of the charges or in mitigation of the penalties.

In a country divided by color and class, racial oppression and poverty have always been causal agents of theft and violence. However, lawyers have had difficulty translating these consequences of racism into the language of the criminal courtroom. The law does not allow the simple fact of racial discrimination as a defense to murder. Long-term unemployment is not accepted as a defense to bank robbery. French novelist Anatole France’s famous ironic quote about the law is an accurate explanation of the inequality of the American legal system: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.” Although legal doctrine has maintained a claim of class neutrality and a facade of colorblindness, in some cases lawyers have been able to break through the criminal law’s resistance to allowing social reality into the courtroom. In 1846 William Henry Seward, one of the foremost lawyers and politicians of the time, defended twenty-one-year-old-William Freeman by arguing that the consequences of slavery and the continued oppression of black people had driven his client mad and caused him to commit murder. Seward thrust the awful conditions suffered by black people into the crucible of the trial. Unfortunately, this ground-breaking defense has basically been lost to the modern generation.

In 1925 Clarence Darrow, the most famous criminal lawyer in American history, again confronted the criminal law with the reality of discrimination and hatred against blacks. He defended Dr. Ossian Sweet, his wife Gladys, his brother Henry, and seven other blacks who were tried for murder when one of them shot into a mob of white people attempting to force the Sweets out of their home in a previously all-white neighborhood in Detroit.

The Freeman and Sweet cases were not described at the time as black rage defenses. But they were stunning examples of lawyers articulating how white supremacy had led to murder charges against blacks. They also were examples of confronting white juries, white judges, and a white legal system with the rage, pride, and strength of black people.

Between the 1930s and the 1970s the best-known black rage case was a fictional one. Richard Wright, in Native Son created the classic case of a lawyer arguing that the system of white supremacy had produced his client’s crimes. Although Native Son was published in 1940, Wright depicted the anguish and bottled-up fury experienced by many of today’s black youth. In the opening scene Bigger Thomas, a young black man, kills a huge rat that has attacked him in his family’s ghetto apartment. As his sister comforts their mother, Bigger tries to shut the crying out of his mind.

He hated his family because he knew that they were suffering and that he was powerless to help them. He knew that the moment he allowed himself to feel to its fulness how they lived, the shame and misery of their lives, he would be swept out of himself with fear and despair. So he held toward them an attitude of iron reserve; he lived with them, but behind a wall, a curtain. And toward himself he was even more exacting. He knew that the moment he allowed what his life meant to enter fully into his consciousness, he would either kill himself or someone else. So he denied himself and acted tough.

Bigger begins to work for a wealthy white family whose daughter Mary attempts to befriend him. One night, after heavy drinking, he helps her into her room and puts the semiconscious young woman in her bed. He then lies down next to her and kisses her. Suddenly, Mary’s blind mother knocks on the door. Terrified that he will be found in her bed, Bigger puts a pillow over Mary’s mouth to keep her quiet. She suffocates, and in a frenzy of fear Bigger tries to dispose of the body in the furnace. Later in the novel he murders his girlfriend because he is afraid that she will talk and give him away.

Bigger is charged with murdering Mary and raping her (which he did not do). His lawyer knows that in the prejudiced public atmosphere there is no chance for a manslaughter verdict, so he has Bigger plead guilty. He then argues to the judge to give Bigger life imprisonment instead of the death penalty.

Wright was a leftist, and in Native Son he created a Communist defense attorney who delivers a passionate indictment of racism. In the attorney’s plea for life imprisonment he attempts to answer the question of “why a man killed.” The answer he proposes is found in the nexus between racial oppression and Bigger’s life. This link between society and the individual is at the crux of the black rage defense.

Thirty-one years after Native Son was written, black rage and black pride became the defining characteristics of two seminal criminal cases. The murder trial of a Chrysler autoworker in Detroit and the bank robbery trial of an unemployed draftsman in San Francisco were the incarnation of what became known as the black rage defense.

What is the black rage defense? It is a legal strategy that centers on the racial oppression experienced by the defendant. It is an attempt to explain to the judge and jury how the defendant’s environment contributed to his or her crime. It shows how concrete instances of racial discrimination impacted on the mental state of the defendant.

It is essential to understand that the black rage defense is not an independent, freestanding defense. That is, one cannot argue that a defendant should be acquitted of murdering his boss because the boss fired him out of racial prejudice. The innovation inherent in the black rage defense is that it merges racial oppression with more conventional criminal defenses.

The law has always recognized state-of-mind defenses. For example, if a person is insane at the time of the criminal act, he can raise his mental condition as a defense. So if, in the above example, the white boss’s racist behavior caused the black worker to lose the ability to control himself, a defense of diminished capacity would be allowed. Such a defense would reduce first-degree murder to second-degree murder or manslaughter. Another example is a young African American surrounded by three skinheads wearing Nazi symbols and calling him “nigger.” If he pulls a gun and shoots one of them, he can raise a self-defense claim. As part of the defense he would be allowed to argue that given his experience with racists it was “reasonable” for him to assume that he was in danger of serious bodily injury, and therefore it was legally justifiable to shoot before he was actually attacked.

State-of-mind defenses allow us to bring the racial reality of America into the court by presenting “social context” or “social framework” evidence. I have also described it to judges as “social reality” or “racial reality” evidence. The phrase “black rage defense” describes a lawyer’s gestalt, a theory of the case, an all-emcompassing strategy that uses racial reality evidence to establish self-defense, diminished capacity, insanity, mistake of fact, duress, or other state-of-mind defenses allowed by the criminal law.

In a larger sense, the black rage defense educates the judge and jury about society’s role in contributing to the criminal act. It is part of a growing body of recognized criminal defenses that have forced the courts to consider the effects of environmental hardship. The Vietnam Vet Syndrome and post-traumatic stress disorder used to defend veterans scarred by the war in Vietnam and African American teenagers scarred by the war in urban America illustrates state-of-mind defenses rooted in social reality. The battered woman defense parallels the black rage defense, in introducing evidence of gender oppression in defense of women charged with crimes of violence against their abusive husbands and boyfriends. The cultural defense, another rapidly growing legal strategy, uses evidence of a defendant’s culture (e.g., Laotian and Vietnamese refugees, Chinese immigrants, or Native Americans) to explain his or her state-of-mind in defense or mitigation of criminal charges.

One major misconception surrounding the black rage defense is that it is a race hatred defense. This notion grew out of cases such as that of Colin Ferguson. Ferguson is the Jamaican immigrant living in New York who killed six people and wounded nineteen others on a Long Island commuter train in 1993. Initially his lawyers said they were going to use a black rage defense as part of an insanity claim. Ferguson later fired them and represented himself, denying that he had done the shootings. In the massive publicity surrounding the case many pundits portrayed the black rage defense as an attempt to justify violence against white people solely on the basis of previous racial oppression. Commentators also criticized the defense as an abdication of individual responsibility. These criticisms are enshrined in Alan Dershowitz’s book The Abuse Excuse, which attacks all environmentally based defenses.

In fact, no black rage defense has ever argued that African Americans are entitled to attack whites solely because of a history of oppression. However, the improper use of the defense by well-meaning lawyers can leave an impression that racial violence against individual whites is a legitimate response to racial discrimination. A mistaken strategy can also lead to a “poor-me” characterization of the defendant. A review of actual cases reveals that judges and juries will reject a defense based on race hatred or victimization.

These inaccurate stereotypes of black rage cases can be symbolized by the picture of an angry black male with a gun in his hand standing over a dead white man. In fact, the cases include all types of crimes, and the black rage defense is often used in positive situations such as self-defense. Nor is it limited to men—African American women also feel agony, grief, misery and anger. The richness of African American literature reminds us of their rage. Just a few years after the success of Native Son, Ann Petry’s novel The Street was published. Petry’s heroine, Lutie Johnson, uses a candlestick to crush the skull of a black man who has abused her. Her violence is described as a reaction to a “lifetime of pent-up resentment.”

First she was venting her rage against the dirty, crowded street. She saw the rows of dilapidated old houses; the small dark rooms; the long steep flights of stairs; the narrow dingy hallways; the little lost girls in Mrs. Hedges’ apartment; the smashed homes where the women did drudgery because their men had deserted them.

Then the limp figure on the sofa became ... the insult in the moist-eyed glances of white men on the subway; became the unconcealed hostility in the eyes of white women; became the gaunt Super pulling her down, down into the basement.

Finally, and the blows were heavier, faster, now she was striking at the white world which thrust black people into a walled enclosure from which there was no escape....

She saw the face and head of the man on the sofa through waves of anger in which he represented all these things and she was destroying them.

Although almost all recorded black rage defenses involve male defendants, chapter 10 in this book, on post-traumatic stress disorder, highlights the juvenile case of seventeen-year-old Felicia Morgan, who in 1991 robbed and killed a teenage girl in Milwaukee. Chapter 9 critiques the two high-profile trials of Inez Garcia, who shot and killed a man who aided his friend in raping her. Garcia is not African American, but the strategy of the black rage defense can and should be used by other races.

The concept that environmental hardship leads to criminal acts regardless of a person’s race can also be found in African American literature. Black rage is the rage of the oppressed. Willard Motley, in his 1947 bestsel-ling novel Knock on Any Door, shows how poverty and police abuse cause an Italian American to turn to crime. Like Bigger Thomas, Nick Romano grew up in Chicago. Although their worlds are separated because of segregation, much of their lives are similar. Motley created a defense lawyer who asks the jury to answer the question, “Who is Nick Romano.”

All of his life has been a dirty, murky, rainy, foggy night.... We might say Nick is guilty—he is guilty of having been reared in desperate poverty in the slums of a big city.... At home, a father who does not understand and who, with a stick or club chases you into the street. Walk with Nick along West Madison at night when the beat cop comes swaggering down the street.... Stay two nights in jail for no other reason than that you were walking on the street. Be slapped!—punched!—kicked!—if you so much as answer—the law—back.

Nick Romano, twenty-one years old, is executed, just as Bigger Thomas is executed. Motley ends the novel by warning the reader that if one were to walk down Maxwell Street and “knock on any door,” they would find another boy just like Nick Romano, filled with rage.

The criminal courtroom has always been a place where the law focuses on the individual. The defense lawyers in Wright’s and Motley’s novels try unsuccessfully to force the legal process to focus on the relationship between society and the alleged criminal. The black rage defense has succeeded in the same endeavor. Although this book concentrates on African Americans, it also discusses cases in which the environmental defense has been extended to a Native American who killed a policeman, and to a poor white ex-convict who robbed six banks.

There has been growing criticism of the political separation of the races in the United States. Social critic Todd Gitlin, in his book The Twilight of Common Dreams, writes that we have developed an “obsession with difference” and have fallen into “identity politics” in which cultural and political debates pit race against race, gender against gender, and lifestyle against lifestyle. Although the black rage defense, by its very name, emphasizes race, it is actually an attempt to bring all Americans closer together. Its premise is that although there are essential differences in the ways people grow up, there are profound underlying similarities in their responses to deprivation, violence, and injustice. Closing our eyes to the impact on social behavior of factors such as racism and poverty takes us down the path to ever more prisons and executions. We will be locked into these and other fruitless responses to crime unless we cross racial and class barriers in order to understand the social forces that contribute to crime. The black rage defense plays one small part in the very large and important movement to break down those barriers.