News media recently gave extensive coverage to the Supreme Court decision that invalidated provisions of the 1964 Voting Rights Act requiring certain states, all in the South, to submit changes in their election laws to the Department of Justice for review and approval. These provisions were originally enacted because of the South’s history of discriminating against blacks and suppressing minority voting. In case you don’t remember, the three civil rights workers who were murdered by Klansmen in Mississippi in 1963 were there to register black voters.
Protecting minority voting rights is important, but not as important as the state trying to kill you in the name of law and order, and the South’s history of discriminating against blacks in their court systems is equally sordid.
If you were a person of color, and living in the South, would you trust “Southern Justice” if you found yourself accused of an infamous crime you didn’t commit? A crime for which you could be put to death?
Criminal justice in the South has such a bad reputation that the term “Southern Justice” has become a pejorative. To most non-Southerners, the term connotes racism and injustice.
“Was This Death Row Inmate Framed?”
This headline isn’t from some tabloid paper. It’s CNN’s lede story today. And it’s about corrupt Southern Justice that sent a black man named Edward Lee Elmore to South Carolina’s death row for 30 years. Quoting CNN (under “fair use”):
“Law enforcement planted evidence and prosecutors manipulated facts …, his lawyers claim. Even with seemingly overwhelming evidence in Elmore’s favor, it took nearly two decades to win his release, in what an appeals court called ‘one of those exceptional cases of extreme malfunctions in the state criminal justice systems.'”
http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/07/us/death-row-stories-elmore/index.html?hpt=hp_t1
Despite these “extreme malfunctions,” the state did not admit to anything, and set Elmore free only when he agreed to plead guilty in exchange for time served. That’s so he can’t sue the authorities for millions of dollars, of course.
Last fall, another South Carolina death penalty case made news. That one involved the 1944 execution of a 14-year-old black boy who was railroaded into the electric chair via a 2 1/2-hour show trial and 10-minute jury deliberation. A team of modern-day crusading lawyers are asking a judge to declare the youth did not get a fair trial. Duh.
In today’s South, hooded Klansmen no longer string up blacks on telephone poles, and I guess that’s some sort of progress. But if Southern states still lynch people of color under the guise of “criminal justice,” have things really changed?
Put another way, if you were a person of color in the South, and were arrested and accused of a death penalty crime, would you trust Southern Justice? Would you expect to get a fair trial? Would you feel confident of being acquitted if you were, in fact, innocent?
In the wake of the Supreme Court decision striking down portions of the 1964 Voting Rights Act, there is much discussion about what can be done to guarantee the voting rights of minority people living in the South. (Although, thanks to GOP voting suppression efforts, this problem isn’t limited to Southern states.) But the right to simply be alive is even more important than the right to vote. And given the sorry track record of Southern Justice, shouldn’t we also be talking about some way to institute federal supervision of how Southern states kill their own citizens?
I think that South Carolina illustrates the tragedy of reconstruction. While those people living there today can not the blamed for the horrible events in South Carolina’s history, they can be blamed for perpetuating an abusive culture that today still celebrates the horrors of slavery, Jim Crow, and the KKK.
Imagine if today’s Germany were to behave like South Carolina. Imagine a Germany that openly flies the Nazi flag, has no minimum wage law, encourages its citizens to carry guns all the time, and misuses its courts as you describe here.
It seems to me that there is a lesson here. The desire for reconciliation in 1865 sadly led to the corruption of reconstruction and the rapid return of the same people whose racism led to the Civil War. Germany and Japan, in contrast, were forced to recognize the horrors of racism and totalitarianism. As a Jew I would certainly prefer to live in Germany rather than living in South Carolina.
Boeing and any other manufacturer that based itself in South Carolina or any other state that perpetuates the horrors of Southern tradition, should be ashamed of itself.
You’re letting South Carolinians off too easy. The sisters of the 1944 murder victims still live in that small town, and they’ve been whining to the media about the efforts to reopen the case in the interest of justice. “Let it rest,” they say. Shame on them. These modern-day crusading lawyers can’t give that black boy his life back, but they can give him his innocence back. No reasonable person would argue he got a fair trial. No one with a shred of conscience would defend putting a kid to death with that kind of sham trial. What are they hiding? Who are they protecting? They aren’t to blame for their sisters’ murders, but they damn sure aren’t innocent of the legal lynching that followed.