Justice on hold
24th October 2016 · 0 Comments
By Edmund W. Lewis
Editor
When it comes to Black men, women and children, justice can be a tricky thing.
Kind of like coaxing a firefly into a jar, getting a rock to skip across a lake more than three times or catching lightning in a bottle.
Every day we hear about another somebody-done-somebody-wrong case with cops of all racial backgrounds gunning down innocent and/or unarmed Black and Brown men, women and children. What we don’t hear about all that often is cops actually getting arrested, standing trial and serving out fair convictions for the havoc they continue to wreak on the lives of Black and Brown civilians.
There is no place on the planet where that is more true than in New Orleans, Ground Zero for mass incarceration and a major feeder of Louisiana, the world’s prison capital and home to one of the most draconian penal institutions in the world.
Here in New Orleans, John Thompson spent 14 years on Death Row at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola after being framed for a murder he didn’t commit. After he was finally exonerated, after having faced several execution dates, a federal jury awarded Thompson $14 million for his ordeal, $1 million for each year he spent on Death Row. No sooner had the settlement deal been reached than Orleans Parish District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro made his way up to the U.S. Supreme Court and told the Justices that the City of New Orleans could not afford to pay the settlement. The high court agreed, and just like that, Thompson was left high and dry.
Compare that to a settlement reached in a case involving former Orleans Parish District Attorney Eddie Jordan, who was sued by former white D.A.’s Office employees who were terminated and replaced with Black employees. Jordan told The Louisiana Weekly in an interview almost a decade ago that some of those white employees made it clear to him from Day One that they were not happy about having to work for the city’s first Black district attorney and did a number of things to make his job more difficult. One of those things was stopping up the toilets on the second floor of the D.A.’s office so that they overflowed and the water seeped down to the first floor, causing both a major workplace headache and a potential health hazard.
When he made personnel changes, something that others have done when they assumed the role of mayor, police chief, district attorney, etc., the terminated employees hit him with a $5 million lawsuit while the City of New Orleans was still reeling from Hurricane Katrina. Nobody went to the Supreme Court and asked the Justices to do away with the costly settlement. Nor did any of the plaintiffs, some of whom lived outside of Orleans Parish, worry about how paying the settlement would negatively impact ongoing recovery efforts in New Orleans.
All they cared about was getting even with Eddie Jordan for having the audacity to think he had the right and the power to build his own support team.
Just about anyone who has spent any time in New Orleans knows that the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office has a long, shameful history of framing Black people for a wide range of crimes including murder. Among those who have been dealt a taste of Southern justice at the hands of a New Orleans D.A. were Curtis Kyles, Jerome Morgan, John Thompson and Shareef Cousin, who was 16 when he was framed for the murder of a white Slidell man on Esplanade Avenue in 19995. Never mind that Cousin was playing in a basketball game at the Tremé Community Center at the time of the murder. In order to get a conviction, the New Orleans Police Department “lost” a statement from a white female eyewitness who told police that her vision was blurry because she didn’t have her eyeglasses on and prosecutors working under then-D.A. Harry Connick Sr. actually hid several witnesses for the defense in the D.A.’s office.
During one of his appeals, Criminal Court Judge Raymond Bigelow told Shareef Cousin, “I order you to die.” He was eventually released.
In case you may have forgotten, that is the same Judge Bigelow who tossed out the case after then-District Attorney Eddie Jordan indicted the “Danziger 7” for the murder of 17-year-old James Brissette and Ronald Madison, a 40-year-old mentally disabled man, on the Danziger Bridge in eastern New Orleans less than a week after Hurricane Katrina.
Earlier this year, the federal court drastically reduced the sentences for the five officers convicted in the case, which also included the wounding of four other unarmed Black civilians. Some of those sentences were cut by decades.
Meanwhile, the current district attorney, Leon Cannizzaro, has refused to indict former NOPD Officer David Warren in the death of 31-year-old Henry Glover who was shot as he stood in the parking lot of a West Bank strip mall less than a week after Hurricane Katrina.
After Glover was shot, he was taken by a good Samaritan to a makeshift police station at an elementary school where he was reportedly beaten and separated from several other Black men at the makeshift station. Glover’s remains were later found burned in an abandoned car on the Mississippi River levee. His skull was later removed from the car by someone and has still not been returned to the Glover frailly for proper burial.
Of the five officers indicted for the killing and cover-up of Glover’s death, only one cop remains in prison today — the one who torched the car in which Glover’s remains were found.
Is it any wonder that many people were skeptical when authorities refused to make public the cause of death for Alton Sterling, the 37-year-old father of five gunned down by two Baton Rouge police on July 5, 2016? And is it any wonder that many people are not happy about how long the U.S. Department of Justice is taking to complete its investigation of the incident, which grabbed international headlines and sparked national demonstrations?
We, the people, demand justice now for Alton Sterling and all of the victims of unconstitutional policing and deadly, unjustifiable force. We demand full-fledged, uncompromising justice, not watered-down, delayed or partial justice.
To deprive the people of that kind of justice would only further erode public faith in government and law enforcement and move this nation closer to a complete breakdown of the principles, laws and customs upon which this nation was founded. All power to the people.
This article originally published in the October 24, 2016 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
