The Rev. Al Sharpton sat so quietly in the courtroom’s spectator benches the judge didn’t even notice he was there. The jury probably didn’t, either, until the lawyer defending one of the white men accused of lynching black jogger Ahmaud Arbery complained to the judge.
Kevin Gough (photo, right), attorney for William Bryan, the vigilante who video-recorded Arbery’s murder, whined bringing “high-profile members of the African-American community into the courtroom” is “intimidating” to the jury.
What we have here, folks, is white fragility on display.
“Just days prior,” CNN says, “Gough had complained that older White men from the South without four-year college degrees, ‘euphemistically known as Bubba or Joe Six Pack,’ seemed to be underrepresented in the pool of potential jurors that had turned up.” This after defense attorneys systematically excluded black people from the jury; only one token black made it onto the final jury of twelve.
One of the pillars of America’s freedoms is open courts and the public’s right to watch judicial proceedings. Explaining this is a bit complicated. The Founding Fathers wrote the right to a “public” trial into the Sixth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution in reaction to Europe’s history of Star Chamber courts. But what if a defendant doesn’t want to exercise that right? The public and media still have a First Amendment right to observe. (Details here and here.)
So, the defense can’t pick and choose who gets to watch.
Judges can still exclude spectators for valid reasons, such as if they’re disruptive. But Sharpton did nothing wrong. Gough’s argument is that who he is makes him a distraction. He told the judge, “We don’t want any more Black pastors coming in here … who really don’t have any ties to this case ….”
But there’s probably more to it than whether Sharpton’s presence in the bleachers is distracting. It certainly appears that Gough not only doesn’t want black people on the jury, he doesn’t want them in the courtroom at all. But what about their First Amendment right to be there? Well, I’d guess he doesn’t think of them as Americans, citizens, or even people.
Which harkens back to times in the not-so-distant past when blacks didn’t have a right not to be lynched and white judges and juries gave free passes to any lynchers brought to trial. Within my lifetime, Rev. Sharpton or any other black pastor would have been kicked out of a trial like this in a southern court.
The question is whether we’re still living in those times.
Read story here.