No Justice, Just Us
24th September 2019 · 0 Comments
The late great comedian Richard Pryor springs to mind, when the case of Crystal Mason comes up. “When we go down to the courthouse looking for justice, that’s what we find, just us,” Pryor joked. But Pryor’s extraordinary talent for laughing through the tears of African-American reality reminds us that when some whites mete out justice, especially if they’re Republicans, you can expect just us to experience the harshest sentences, even when we’re innocent.
American history is littered with such instances, where legal eagles engage in perversions of justice, ignore the law or create laws that disproportionately affect people of color. Think about the exonerated Central Park Five. And today, it’s still just us who are not getting justice.
Last week, on September 10, Crystal Mason, a mother of three and a grandmother and caretaker of her brother’s four children, stood before an all-Republican appeals panel on the Texas Court of Appeals, which has been Republican-held since the 80s, to appeal the five year sentence she received for casting a provisional ballot during the 2016 Presidential Primary. If her appeal is denied, Mason will appeal to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state’s highest criminal court.
Mason, a convicted felon, said she was never told that she would not be able to vote in elections until she finished serving her supervised release. She was sent back to federal prison from September 2018 until May of this year.
Beginning in 2011, Mason served nearly three years in federal prison for tax fraud. She and ex-husband, Sanford Taylor Hobbs III, owned and operated a tax preparation business, in which they submitted inflated tax refunds to the Internal Revenue Service on behalf of clients.
After her release and at her mother’s urging, Mason went to vote in the 2016 Presidential election. She cast a provisional ballot because her name was not on the rolls. Even though her ballot didn’t count, prosecutors brought charges against Mason and convinced a judge she had knowingly voted illegally.
Mason’s lawyers say she is a victim of voter suppression. They said since Mason was ineligible to vote, her provisional ballot did not count and was tossed out. So, technically, she didn’t really vote.
Or consider the case of another Tarrant county person of color. Rosa Maria Ortega, a 37-year-old mother of four and legal permanent resident had a green card and was convicted of voting illegally. She received a sentence of eight years in prison for voting in the 2012 general election and the 2014 Republican primary runoff. Ortega said she thought she had the same rights as other citizens. Although Ortega was sentenced to eight years in jail for voting illegally, she is eligible to receive good time, work credits, and bonus time, making her potentially eligible for parole in less than 12 months.
Clearly, Republicans are pulling out all the stops to continue to incarcerate people of color and to keep them from voting. Yet, the browning of America continues as do the continual targeting and discrimination against people of color.
A white woman, Terri Lynn Rote, 56, was arrested in October 2016 after going to an early voting site in Des Moines, Iowa to cast a second vote for Donald Trump in the U.S. presidential election. She reportedly told police she cast two absentee ballots before the election because she believed Trump’s claims that the election was rigged. She receives probation. A judge gave Rote two years of probation.
Then there’s the case of Russ Casey, a white Texas justice of the peace. Casey admitted to turning in fake signatures in order to get on a primary ballot. A judge gave him five years of probation.
In Louisiana, there was much celebrating when Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards signed ACT 636 into law in 2018, restoring the vote to ex-felons. But as with anything that resembles justice, when it comes to us there’s a caveat. Only 36,000 ex-felons, who hadn’t been incarcerated for five years, were eligible to vote last March. And thanks to the Southern Poverty Law Center, naturalized citizens here no longer jump through hoops to vote. The SPLC dropped its 2014 lawsuit against the state, when the legislature abolished the voter suppression law.
These and other incidences of injustices perpetrated by those who portend to mete out justice are glaring examples of why the criminal justice system must be reformed. This has been going on since kidnapped Africans were brought to these shores.
We the people should come together and call for an amendment to Section One of the 13th Amendment of the United States Constitution, for starters: “Section One. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” That exception needs to be struck down. Although the 13th Amendment abolishes slavery, it also allows for people who are incarcerated to be enslaved.
And maybe the courts would do well to revisit Section One of the 15th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, before jailing ex-felons for attempting to vote.
The 15th Amendment, which was ratified in 1870, contained two sections. Section One : “The right of citizens… to vote shall not be denied or abridged… on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
We the people have got to keep insisting that justice is not blind… but it should be… colorblind.
This article originally published in the September 23, 2019 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
