The arc of the moral universe bends toward justice

Commentator and author Jeffrey Toobin interviewed Bryan Stevenson, a lawyer and the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, for The New York Times--here is the final question and answer: 

Toobin: Final question, Bryan. True or false: The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice?

Stevenson: I think it’s true. Of course, it depends on people’s willingness to prioritize justice and refuse to tolerate injustice. But when I look at human history, it’s hard for me to say that it isn’t true. The fact that you and I are having this conversation in a space occupied by The New York Times is, in itself, evidence of that. I think about this all the time. The people who came before me would put on their Sunday best, go out to protest for the right to vote, get bloodied and beaten, then go home, wipe the blood off, change their clothes and go back out again.

My generation has not had to do that in the same way. Future generations, hopefully, won’t have to either. That just means the struggle for justice will take on a new form. So yes, I am persuaded of the truth of that — despite the moment we’re in. I guess one good thing about getting older is that you gain a broader perspective.

For example, in 1995, if you had told me we’d reach a point where the execution rate would drop dramatically, where very few people would be sentenced to death, where 11 states would abolish the death penalty, and where more and more states would choose not to use it — I couldn’t see that. I had to believe it. Or another example: Fifteen years ago, if you had told me I’d be operating a museum, a memorial and a park dealing with slavery, lynching and segregation — and that hundreds of thousands of people would come, that I’d even have to open restaurants and a hotel to accommodate them — I would’ve said that was crazy. And yet, here I am.

So I think that quote is really about whether we believe that truth has the power to be resurrected, even in the face of lies, and triumph. And I believe that, in every aspect of my being: culturally, socially, politically, spiritually. That’s what I’ve experienced. And the fact that there are difficult days, dark days, doesn’t dissuade me of that.

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CREATORS: States Look to Their Own Constitutions for Guidance on Racial Equality

Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
May 13, 2025

In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling that held racial segregation laws did not violate the U.S. Constitution as long as the facilities for each race were equal in quality. Justice Henry Billings Brown wrote the majority opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson.

Six justices joined with Brown, who opined that although the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed the legal equality of all races in the United States, "it was not intended to prevent social or other types of discrimination."

The much-maligned decision in Plessy remained in effect about education for 58 years. Finally, on May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education — which held that the "separate but equal" doctrine was unconstitutional in the context of public schools and educational facilities.

The Supreme Court issued a unanimous 9-0 decision in favor of Brown. The Court ruled that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal," and therefore laws that impose them violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Brown paved the way for minority students to have a fair and equal education. In 1974, the Equal Educational Opportunities Act was established, prohibiting discrimination against faculty, staff and students. This included racial segregation of students and required school districts to take action to overcome barriers to students' equal participation.

However, 69 years after Brown, the Supreme Court rejected affirmative action at schools of higher education, declaring that the race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina were unlawful, eliminating a pillar of higher education.

In Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and SFFA v. University of North Carolina, the Brown decision was often quoted in the 230 pages of opinions.

The Supreme Court held that state laws cannot favor one race over another, that the equal protection clause requires equal treatment under the law for everyone "without regard to race or color." The decisions turned the Brown decision on its head. Affirmative action — which had been used to level the playing field for minority students was now considered to be imposing discriminatory practices on white prospective students.

The landmark decision in Brown, which overturned a legacy of racism in this country, was used to rationalize an argument eliminating affirmative action. The decisions in Harvard and North Carolina will, as Adam Liptak wrote in The New York Times, "(A)ll but ensured that the student population at the campuses of elite institutions would become whiter and more Asian and less Black and Latino."

Then came President Donald Trump's second term. Almost immediately upon taking office, a letter went out to state education leaders across the country, suggesting Title I funding — targeted to schools with a high proportion of low-income students — would be cut if the use of Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion (DEI) programs continued.

School and state officials were asked to sign a certification or "loyalty oath" and return it to the U.S Department of Education acknowledging they are complying with the directive. The oath has been challenged in court.

In light of an unsympathetic Supreme Court and an administration bent on rewriting the history of discrimination in this country, advocates for racial equality are fighting back. They have turned to state constitutions and state courts to fight "resegregation."

State judges in New Jersey and Minnesota have interpreted their respective state constitutions as imposing responsibility on the state to remedy racial discrimination. Expect more states to look to their state constitution for relief, while other states relish the federal government's undoing of years of progress toward racial equity.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner's Toll, 2010 was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino

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Tulsa Race Massacre not a mob but 'coordinated, military-style attack'

The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, in which a prosperous Black neighborhood in Oklahoma was destroyed and up to 300 people were killed, was not committed by an uncontrolled mob but was the result of “a coordinated, military-style attack” by white citizens, the Justice Department said in a report, according to The New York Times.

The report, stemming from an investigation announced in September, is the first time that the federal government has given an official, comprehensive account of the events of May 31 and June 1, 1921, in the Tulsa neighborhood of Greenwood. Although it formally concluded that, more than a century later, no person alive could be prosecuted, it underscored the brutality of the atrocities committed.

“The Tulsa Race Massacre stands out as a civil rights crime unique in its magnitude, barbarity, racist hostility and its utter annihilation of a thriving Black community,” Kristen Clarke, assistant attorney general for civil rights, said in a statement. “In 1921, white Tulsans murdered hundreds of residents of Greenwood, burned their homes and churches, looted their belongings and locked the survivors in internment camps.”

No one today could be held criminally responsible, she said, “but the historical reckoning for the massacre continues.”

The report’s legal findings noted that if contemporary civil rights laws were in effect in 1921, federal prosecutors could have pursued hate crime charges against both public officials and private citizens.

Though considered one of the worst episodes of racial terror in U.S. history, the massacre was relatively unknown for decades: City officials buried the story, and few survivors talked about the massacre.

The Justice Department began its investigation under the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act, which allows the agency to examine such crimes resulting in death that occurred before 1980. Investigators spoke with survivors and their descendants, looked at firsthand accounts and examined an informal review by the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation, the precursor to the F.B.I. In that 1921 report, the agency asserted that the riot was not the result of “racial feeling,” and suggested that Black men were responsible for the massacre.

The new 123-page report corrects the record, while detailing the scale of destruction and its aftermath. The massacre began with an unfounded accusation. A young Black man, Dick Rowland, was being held in custody by local authorities after being accused of assaulting a young white woman.

According to the report, after a local newspaper sensationalized the story, an angry crowd gathered at the courthouse demanding that Mr. Rowland be lynched. The local sheriff asked Black men from Greenwood, including some who had recently returned from military service, to come to the courthouse to try to prevent the lynching. Other reports suggest the Black neighbors offered to help but were turned away by the sheriff.

The white mob viewed attempts to protect Mr. Rowland as “an unacceptable challenge to the social order,” the report said. The crowd grew and soon there was a confrontation. Hundreds of residents (some of whom had been drinking) were deputized by the Tulsa Police. Law enforcement officers helped organize these special deputies who, along with other residents, eventually descended on Greenwood, a neighborhood whose success inspired the name Black Wall Street.

The report described the initial attack as “opportunistic,” but by daybreak on June 1, “a whistle blew, and the violence and arsons that had been chaotic became systematic.” According to the report, up to 10,000 white Tulsans participated in the attack, burning or looting 35 city blocks. It was so “systematic and coordinated that it transcended mere mob violence,” the report said.

In the aftermath, the survivors were left to rebuild their lives with little or no help from the city. The massacre’s impact, historians say, is still felt generations later.

In the years since the attack, survivors and their descendants and community activists have fought for justice. Most recently, a lawsuit seeking reparations filed on behalf of the last two known centenarian survivors was dismissed by Oklahoma justices in June. In recent years, Tulsa has excavated sections of a city cemetery in search of the graves of massacre victims. And in 2024, the city created a commission to study the harms of the atrocity and recommend solutions. The results are expected in the coming weeks.

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Convenience store owner shoots Black child falsely accused of shoplifting

On November 10, 58-year-old Rick Chow, owner of Columbia’s Xpress Mart Shell Station in South Carolina, chased and shot 14-year-old Cyrus Carmack-Belton whom he falsely accused of shoplifting, reported Martie Bowser at Blavity News. 

According to local news station WLTX, Chow accused Carmack-Belton of stealing four water bottles.  

During a press conference on Monday, Sheriff Leon Lott revealed the teenager had not shoplifted anything from the store. He later described the shooting as “unjustified” and “senseless.”

As he commented on Sunday’s tragic event, Lott told the media and members of the community, “You don’t do what happened last night.”

The interaction between Chow and Carmack-Belton began around 8 p.m. The teen and the store owner argued after Chow accused the 14-year-old of stealing water he touched.

Although Carmack-Belton touched the bottles, surveillance footage showed he placed them back in the cooler.

After the teen left the store, Chow’s son chased Carmack-Belton into a nearby apartment complex.

Lott stated the teen tripped and fell before Chow shot him in the back after his son claimed the teen had a gun.

The outlet reports authorities confirmed Carmack-Belton had a gun, but he didn’t point it at the father and son.

The Richland County coroner, Naida Rutherford, reported the gunshot wound injured the teen’s heart.

She later took to social media to clear up any misinformation about the shooting, stating it would be ruled a homicide.

Lott was openly distraught during the press conference. The Daily Mail transcribed the transgressions he felt with Chow’s actions.

“You don’t shoot somebody in the back if he’s not a threat to you. It’s the same standard that we do, that cops have to live by. You have to be defending someone’s life or your life. There has to be immediate danger to you.”

He emphasized the teen was running away with his back turned and wasn’t pointing a gun at anyone.

“Even if he had shoplifted four bottles of water, it’s not something you shoot anyone over much less a 14-year-old.”

Since the shooting, the convenience store on Parklane Road has been vandalized and looted in retaliation for the murder.

Community members have held multiple protests and vigils at the location, demanding justice for the teenager.

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Study: PA State Police cite drivers at comparable rates for various races and ethnicities

Pennsylvania drivers were pulled over and cited by state police last year at roughly comparable rates for various races and ethnicities, according to information about 450,000 vehicle stops released by The Associated Press.

“The findings across multiple analyses demonstrated no substantive racial and ethnic differences in the initial reason for the stop by the Pennsylvania State Police,” Robin Engel, a researcher now at Ohio State, said in releasing the $194,000 study at the state police academy in Hershey, Pennsylvania.

Researchers also found that trooper decisions about how to enforce the law after they stop someone are most strongly based on legal factors and not the drivers’ or troopers’ race or ethnicity.

However, troopers in the field were slightly more likely to engage in “discretionary” searches of Black drivers’ vehicles than those of white or Latino drivers when the drivers’ criminal histories were factored in, the report said.

Troopers do not ask drivers their race or ethnicity but record that information based on their subjective perceptions.

The state police and the American Civil Liberties Union in Pennsylvania two years ago agreed to settle a federal civil rights complaint alleging that seven troopers targeted Latino drivers for vehicle stops and detained them to check their immigration status. The 10 people who sued, all Latino, said troopers demanded “papers” from drivers and passengers.

To settle the case, the Pennsylvania State Police enacted a regulation prohibiting troopers from stopping anyone based on immigration status, citizenship or nationality, and stopping them from questioning people about their immigration status unless answers are needed for a criminal investigation unrelated to civil immigration laws.

The new report on traffic stops echoed last year’s findings that racial and ethnic disparities in Pennsylvania State Police traffic stops have become rare, likely because of increased scrutiny and supervision in the field. Authorities have also changed training tactics and prioritized treating people equally.

In an effort to make their work more transparent, state police have also been expanding the use of body cameras. Nearly half the force is now equipped to wear them.

Wider information about Pennsylvania traffic stops may soon become available. A law passed by the Legislature in May mandates other local police departments that serve populations of at least 5,000 people also must collect and make public traffic stop data. The measure takes effect at the end of next year.

Rep. Napoleon Nelson, D-Montgomery, chair of the Pennsylvania Legislative Black Caucus, called the newly released data “neither comforting nor extremely surprising.” He said the study will be closely reviewed and that information from smaller departments is needed to form a full picture.

“We don’t know the regional differences in statistical analyses yet, we haven’t seen that,” Nelson said. “There’s a lot we don’t know.”

A review of nearly 4.6 million vehicle and pedestrian stops by 535 California law enforcement agencies in 2022 found that Black people accounted for nearly 13% of traffic stops in that state, where they make up about 5% of the total population. A 2022 study in Massachusetts found no evidence of racial disparity in the decision to pull over drivers, but Hispanic and Black motorists were more likely than white drivers to be cited and white drivers more likely to get off with a just a warning.

In Missouri, a 2018 review concluded African-American drivers were 85% more likely to be pulled over than whites and that white motorists were less likely to be searched than Black, Hispanic and American Indian people but more likely to be caught with contraband. The report also concluded that 7.1% of Hispanics and 6.6% of Black people were arrested after stops, compared to 4.2% of whites.

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Creators: Susan Smith, Infamous Killer of Her Children, Is Where She Belongs

Matthew T. Mangino
Creators Syndicate
July 23, 2024

In the summer of 1994, O.J. Simpson engaged in his infamous low-speed chase with a parade of Los Angeles squad cars loaded with police officers who wanted to take him into custody for the alleged murder of his wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. Three months later, on the other side of the country, Susan Smith put her children in a vehicle, strapped them into their car seats and started them on a slow roll to the bottom of John D. Long Lake.

Although Smith's case started after and ended before O.J.'s case, it certainly didn't live in the shadow of the so-called trial of the century. When Smith let her car roll into a lake in Union County, South Carolina, she kicked off a media frenzy that has served as a harbinger of things to come. A throng of media descended on Union County and didn't leave until Smith was shipped down state to prison.

Smith was 22 years old when she told investigators that a Black man had carjacked her while the two boys were still inside the car. The man let her out and sped off with her children. The man who prosecuted Smith, Tommy Pope, is now a member of the South Carolina legislature. He recently told Angenette Levy of the Law and Crime Network that Smith's first assertion that "a Black man carjacked the vehicle with her sons inside" stirred international interest in the case.

She wept on national television, pleading for the children's safe return. "Your mama loves you so much," she said during one news conference, according to Fox News.

Smith was convicted of murdering her children. She has been behind bars for nearly three decades and now has a parole hearing scheduled for Nov. 4.

Her adjustment in prison has been anything but stellar. According to ABC News, Capt. Alfred R. Rowe Jr., a supervisor at the Women's Correctional Institution, was terminated and charged with having sex with Smith while she was incarcerated. A second guard, Lt. Houston Cagle, admitted to also having sex with Smith.

More recently, Smith has been hard at work courting her admirers — according to recorded phone calls from Leath Correctional Institution reviewed by the New York Post, Smith carried on romantic and sexual conversations with at least 12 men over the past three years.

"It's time for me to get out," Smith told one of her admirers over the phone earlier this year. "I've done my time. I'm ready to go."

How will her conduct impact her chances at parole?

Some state parole decision-makers use various assessments including risk, sex offending, mental health and drug and alcohol. Risk assessment tools coupled with parole criteria are thought to provide uniformity to a board's decision-making process.

The South Carolina Department of Probation, Parole and Pardon Services has a list of criteria it considers when an individual is eligible for parole. Although the board has absolute discretion with regard to parole, there are 16 factors that the board may consider.

Three of those factors weigh heavily against Smith's parole. First, the seriousness of the offense. It is difficult to think of a more callous act than drowning your children. Second, the inmates conduct while in prison. Sex with guards and phone sex with potential financial supporters is not a good look for someone who wants the board's mercy. Finally, a fact that will play a significant role in the board's decision is the position of the judge, prosecutor and victim's family with regard to parole. Pope, Smith's prosecutor, has already said that he believes in truth in sentencing, "life should mean life."

Parole in South Carolina is a privilege, not a right. Smith may be ready to go, but she is likely to remain behind bars for the foreseeable future.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book "The Executioner's Toll, 2010" was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino.

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Family of wrongfully executed Pennsylvania man sue 90 years later

Susie Williams Carter was only around a year old when her 16-year-old brother, Alexander McClay Williams, was convicted of murder and executed in an electric chair in 1931. She never knew him. But now, more than 90 years after her brother’s death, she wants to tell everyone about him, reported the Washington Post.

“I want the world to know that he did not do this,” Carter, 94, told The Washington Post on Monday.

It took decades, and the dogged work of the great-grandson of Williams’s defense lawyer, to clear his name. Williams, the youngest person to be executed in Pennsylvania history, had his conviction overturned in 2022 when attorneys brought the case to a Delaware County judge after finding that investigators ignored evidence and pressured Williams, a Black minor, to sign several confessions before his trial.

Williams’s exoneration from the almost century-old conviction was a watershed moment for his family. It also cleared the way for them to seek further recourse. On Friday, they sued Delaware County and representatives for the estates of two detectives and the assistant district attorney in Delaware at the time of Williams’s trial, all now deceased, seeking unspecified punitive damages for Williams’s wrongful conviction and execution.

“The next step is to bring justice,” Carter said. “And to keep people from doing things like this.”

Delaware County and attorneys representing the estates did not immediately respond to requests for comment Monday afternoon.

Williams was arrested in 1930 after a White matron at the Delaware County reform school he attended was found dead. Vida Robare, 34, had been stabbed with an ice pick 47 times in a grisly killing that quickly sparked national intrigue, according to Carter’s lawsuit and research conducted by Sam Lemon, the great-grandson of Williams’s defense attorney who led the effort to reexamine his case.

Williams, who was arrested decades before the 1963 Supreme Court ruling that guaranteed criminal defendants the right to counsel, denied the allegations initially but was questioned five times without a lawyer or parent present and ultimately signed three confessions, according to the lawsuit.

Lemon and attorneys who worked to exonerate Williams told The Post in 2022 that prosecutors ignored several pieces of evidence that might have cast doubt on his conviction. A bloody handprint of an adult man found at the crime scene did not match Williams’s handprint. Robare had been discovered by her ex-husband, whom she had recently divorced for “extreme cruelty,” according to family court records. Detectives told a local newspaper that Robare probably was overpowered by an adult.

An all-White jury convicted Williams of murder in January 1931, and he was sent to the electric chair. Carter was too young to remember her brother’s death, she said. But she saw it weigh on her family in the years that followed.

“It breaks my heart when I think of all the things that my mother and father went through,” she said.

Carter said she had assumed Williams was guilty after she was told that he had confessed. Decades later, when Lemon approached Carter with new information about the trial, she was overjoyed and thought back to her parents insisting that her brother was innocent, she said.

Carter saw the county overturn Williams’s conviction in June 2022. In the same courthouse where Williams was convicted, then-Delaware County President Judge Kevin F. Kelly granted a motion for a retrial in Williams’s case, but the district attorney chose not to retry the case. Then-Gov. Tom Wolf (D) exonerated Williams and apologized on behalf of the state, calling his execution “an egregious miscarriage of justice.”

“The Bible says that when Cain killed Abel, God said his blood cried out from the ground,” Carter said. “Well, my brother’s blood must have cried out all these years. And he finally got it answered.”

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Creators: On the 70th Anniversary of Brown, School Segregation Continues

Matthew T. Mangino
Creators
May 20, 2024

This past week marked the U.S. Supreme Court setting aside, a portion of, certainly one of the worst decisions in the Court's 235-year history.

In 1896, the high court issued a ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson that held racial segregation laws did not violate the U.S. Constitution as long as the facilities for each race were equal in quality, a doctrine that came to be known as "separate but equal."

In 1892, Homer Plessy, a mixed-race resident of New Orleans, deliberately violated Louisiana's Separate Car Act of 1890, which required "equal, but separate" railroad accommodations for white and non-white passengers. Plessy was charged with boarding a "whites-only" car. Judge John Howard Ferguson refused to throw out the charge against Plessy and Plessy's case ended up before the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court issued a 7-1 decision against Plessy, ruling that the Louisiana law did not violate the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, stating that although the 14th Amendment established the legal equality of whites and Blacks it did not, and could not, require the elimination of all "distinctions based upon color." The decision legitimized the "Jim Crow" laws that reestablished racial segregation after Reconstruction.

Justice John Marshall Harlan was the lone dissent, writing that the U.S. Constitution "is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens." The Separate Car Act's separating passengers by race was a violation of the U.S. Constitution.

The disgraceful decision in Plessy remained in effect with regard to education for 58 years. Finally on May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education — which held that the "separate but equal" doctrine was unconstitutional in the context of public schools and educational facilities — severely weakening Plessy but not specifically overruling the decision.

The Brown case began in 1951 when the public school system in Topeka, Kansas, refused to enroll a local Black man's daughter at the school closest to her home. Oliver Brown's daughter was instead required to bus to a segregated Black school down the road.

Brown and 12 other local Black families in similar situations filed a lawsuit in federal court against the Board of Education, alleging that its segregation policy was unconstitutional.

A special three-judge panel of the U.S District Court for the District of Kansas heard the case and ruled against Brown, relying on Plessy v. Furgeson. The decision was appealed to the Supreme Court by the NAACP's chief counsel, and future member of the Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall.

The Supreme Court issued a unanimous 9-0 decision in favor of Brown. The court ruled that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal," and therefore laws that impose them violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

The decision, announced 70 years ago this month, overturned the specious "separate but equal" doctrine and opened the door to full and fair education for all students regardless of race.

But, according to ABC News, seven decades later, "while racial mandates no longer dictate enrollment, schools across the country remain segregated for a variety of reasons."

"A lot of the folks with economic means, who are more likely to be white, are now sending their kids to private schools at a higher rate," University of California Merced associate professor Whitney Pirtle, told ABC News.

At the time of Brown v. Board of Education, charter and magnet schools — publicly funded institutions that can differ from traditional district schools — did not exist.

Magnet schools were created to encourage voluntary desegregation by attracting diverse students with a shared interest or learning style. The result was not as encouraging. According to an ABC News' analysis, (Magnet schools) "are more than twice as likely as non-magnet schools to have at least one racial group represented at double its district rate."

The same analysis found that charter schools also pull money from those school districts that need it most. Today, segregation continues through private, magnet and charter schools.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book "The Executioner's Toll, 2010" was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino.

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Most Individuals Exonerated Last Year Were People of Color with Official Misconduct a Frequent Factor

The National Registry of Exonerations released a comprehensive report on exonerations in 2023. The Registry recorded 153 exonerations last year and nearly 84 percent (127/153) were people of color. Nearly 61 percent of the exonerees (93/153) were Black. 

New data show that wrongfully convicted individuals in the United States have received at least $4 billion in compensation since 1989 from state and local governments. The payout has nearly doubled in just five years since 2019, when compensation to exonerees in the U.S. totaled about $2.2 billion. This significant increase reflects the growing number of exonerations, and is one of the costs of wrongful convictions, particularly in Illinois, New York, and Texas. 

New York leads the pack with $1.1 billion total compensation, 70 percent of which was for damages in civil lawsuits (which are almost always paid by cities and counties), while in Texas, exonerees received $192 million, 86 percent of which was paid as state compensation. 

Jeffrey Gutman, special contributor to the National Registry of Exonerations and professor at the George Washington University Law School who collected the data, said, “This total will get bigger in the next few years, rapidly. The number of states that pay compensation to exonerees is growing. Many exonerees have claims that are still pending, and we'll keep seeing more exonerations of innocent people who spent decades in prison, probably at an accelerating rate." 

Since 1989, 50 percent of all exonerees and 53 percent of murder exonerees have received some compensation. But the amounts they received vary enormously. 

Official misconduct occurred in at least 118 exonerations (or 77 percent) in 2023. Seventy-five homicide cases—85 percent of homicide exonerations in 2023—were marred by official misconduct. Other contributing factors in various combinations included perjury or false accusations, false or misleading forensic evidence, mistaken witness identification, false confessions, and ineffective assistance of counsel. 

“This demonstrates once again a troubling reality in America’s justice system,” said Barbara O’Brien, professor at Michigan State University College of Law and editor of the Registry. “With 153 exonerations, predominantly affecting people of color, and billions in compensation paid since 1989, the toll of wrongful convictions is undeniable.” 

“Official misconduct continued to undermine the integrity of the most series cases, including those in which innocent defendants were sentenced to death,” O’Brien said. “And while compensation is being granted, it remains inequitable.” 

People exonerated in 2023 lost 2,230 years collectively for crimes they did not commit. That is an average of 14.6 years per exoneree for wrongful imprisonment. 

“The numbers are staggering. People exonerated last year lost 22 centuries of time all together,” said Ken Otterbourg, report co-author and Registry researcher. “Some innocent people go into prison as a young person and come out with grey hair. The vast majority of innocent people who were exonerated last year after being wrongly convicted of crimes are Black or Brown.” 

The top states for exonerations (in order) for 2023 were Illinois, Texas, New York, and Pennsylvania, with California and Oregon tied for fifth. The top four states accounted for 54 percent of the 2023 exonerations. 

The report found that 86 exonerations—56 percent of the 153 exonerations—were of defendants who had been convicted of murder, four of whom had been sentenced to death.

The report is available here.

The origins of canine use in law enforcement

State-sanctioned canine attacks–like those implemented by modern police canine units–were common in chattel slavery, reported The Appeal. Legal scholar Madalyn Wasilczuk speaks of how white enslavers “conceived of an enslaved person’s attempt to obtain freedom as a type of high-value property theft, appropriately recaptured with brute force.” The use of dog attacks to preserve enslavers’ economic interests was legal, and thus not a rare act committed by a few bigots. Wasilczuk explains that the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 federally legalized slave patrols’ ability to seize slaves in free states, often accompanied by hunting dogs—and the act was later nicknamed “the Bloodhound Bill” as a result. Legal scholar Michael Swistara stresses that these dog attacks were intentionally gruesome. Swistara explains how, as early as the 1700s, records show enslavers “bred Cuban bloodhounds with the explicit purpose of raising them to enact violence against Black people” and “the scars of dog bites were so common that they” were physical badges of slavery, becoming “marks used to identify [Black] escapees in advertisements for rewards.”

In addition to the violence these dogs inflicted, the dogs themselves were also forced, nonconsenting partners. Swistara correctly argues that police dogs were and still are themselves subjugated under the carceral state as disposable weapons used to perpetuate racial and economic inequality. Slaveholders had to deliberately break the bond between humans and dogs, humanity’s best friend. To conscript dogs into Black people’s racial subjugation and make the animals feel animosity towards Black people, “enslavers trained dogs by forcing enslaved people to beat the dogs[…]while others arranged planned chases or commanded dogs to attack enslaved people who had been forced to secure themselves to trees.”

Furthering this divide, slaveholders would feed their dogs rich diets of meat while denying the same to enslaved people. The institution of slavery was so desperate to suppress any bonds between enslaved people and dogs that these states even made it illegal for enslaved people to have dogs, claiming dog ownership constituted weapon possession. Despite the fact that dogs had to be trained to recognize and attack Blackness as they could not detect inherent racial differences, many “white Southerners, including Thomas Jefferson, believed that Black people smelled, looked, felt, and tasted different such that their dogs could detect differences between races imperceptible to humans but objectively present.” As Wasilczuk aptly summarizes, ultimately, “in treating dogs’ perceptions of their handlers’ prejudices as innate, white Southerners employed their animals in the project of race- making and racialized subordination.” Dogs thereby became forced partners to state violence.

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Pennsylvania will finally provide state funding for indigent defense

Pennsylvania will finally provide state funding for local public defenders, leaving South Dakota as the only state not to fund indigent defense, according to the Sixth Amendment Center.

Earlier in the year, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro included $10 million for indigent defense in the annual budget (subsequently decreased to $7.5 million). However, this new funding could not be used without the state legislature passing a fiscal code allowing for it.

On December 13, the final day of the 2023 session, the legislature passed the fiscal code creating an indigent defense advisory group within the existing Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency. The indigent defense advisory group is tasked with proposing minimum statewide standards on qualifications and data collection, providing training, and awarding grants.

Looking back, Pennsylvania has long been on notice for failing to ensure effective representation:

·        A 1995 ABA-sponsored report concluded that Allegheny County (Pittsburgh) prevented the public defender’s office from providing constitutionally adequate representation through underfunding and neglect. 

A    A 2011 ACLU report concluded Allegheny County achieved no improvements in the intervening 16 years.

A 2002 NLADA report found that Venango County’s public defender office was understaffed and underfunded.

A 2003 Pennsylvania Supreme Court Committee on Racial and Gender Bias in the Justice System report found serious indigent defense deficiencies, including a prevalence of flat fee contracts creating disincentives to effective advocacy.

A 2003 Juvenile Law Center report found serious deficiencies in the delivery of indigent defense to juvenile defendants statewide.

A 2011 Joint State Government Task Force on Services to Indigent Criminal Defendants report found that the problems identified in the 2003 Supreme Court Committee remained.

A 2021 Legislative Budget and Finance Committee report found that Pennsylvania public defender offices lacked caseload controls.

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Eleven people shot by Indianapolis police in 2023, all but one black

The Concerned Clergy of Indianapolis said they lost faith in Police Chief Randal Taylor after a Black motorist stopped for a traffic violation was fatally shot running away from an officer August 3, reported the Indianapolis Sar.

Six more people were shot by city police in the eight weeks that followed — and a total of 11 in the first nine months of the year. All but one of them are Black.

The repeated use of deadly force has invoked apathy for some people, who accept it as unavoidable in this era of increased gun ownership and strained relations between residents and the people sworn to protect them.

Members of the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department, who have been shot twice this year on city streets, say they also have had enough.

“We are fed up with it. The community should be fed up with it,” Assistant Chief Chris Bailey said after the April shooting.

What’s driving the rash of police shootings this year isn’t clear. Police, politicians and community advocates have differing opinions. Experts say a reason can’t be known without scrutinizing each case.

“You would have to analyze the data to see what, if any, patterns emerge from these shootings,” said Jon Shane, professor of police policy and practice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

While debate continues about what may be driving the uptick, the fact remains Indianapolis police officers have killed people this year at a level not seen since 2016.

Chief Taylor told IndyStar in an interview he cannot recall a time in his 36-year career in law enforcement that so many police shootings have happened in such a short period.

"It's definitely concerning," he said.

Fewer police shootings in other cities

Of the 11 people Indianapolis police have shot in the first nine months of the year, six have died. In 2022, police shot four people, one fatally. Officers in six additional incidents fired their guns but did not strike anyone.

“It's a very rare occurrence," Stephanie Whitehead, a criminal justice professor at Indiana University East, said about the frequency of shootings since August.

Not included in the total are three people who were shot by state troopers in the city. Within a week in May, Indiana State Police troopers shot two people in separate incidents. In February, a state trooper shot a man being tracked in a gun and drug investigation.

More people have been shot by Indianapolis police this year than by other agencies in cities with roughly similar population sizes.

San Francisco police, for example, have shot six people since 2022.

Indianapolis surpassed Columbus, Ohio, a slightly larger city, where police have shot 10 people so far this year. Six were shot last year, according to the police department.

Indianapolis also stands out compared to several smaller Midwestern cities.

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Cities might consider just letting disgruntled police officers leave

Radley Balko writing in The New York Times: 

In a staggering report last month, the Department of Justice documented pervasive abuse, illegal use of force, racial bias and systemic dysfunction in the Minneapolis Police Department. City police officers engaged in brutality or made racist comments, even as a department investigator rode along in a patrol car. Complaints about police abuse were often slow-walked or dismissed without investigation. And after George Floyd’s death, instead of ending the policy of racial profiling, the police just buried the evidence.

The Minneapolis report was shocking, but it wasn’t surprising. It doesn’t read much differently from recent Justice Department reports about the police departments in Chicago, Baltimore, Cleveland, Albuquerque, New Orleans, Ferguson, Mo., or any of three recent reports from various sources about Minneapolis, from 2003, 2015 and 2016.

Amid spiking nationwide homicide rates in 2020 and 2021 and a continuing shortage of police officers, many in law enforcement have pointed to investigations like these — along with “defund the police”-style activism — as the problem. With all the criticism they are weathering, the argument goes, officers are so hemmed in, they can no longer do their job right; eventually they quit, defeated and demoralized. Fewer police officers, more crime.

Lying just below the surface of that characterization is a starkly cynical message to marginalized communities: You can have accountable and constitutional policing, or you can have safety. But you can’t have both.

In accord with that view, some academic studies have found that more police officers can correlate with less crime. But the studies don’t account for factors that the Minneapolis report highlights — the social costs of police brutality and misconduct, how they can erode public trust, how that erosion of trust affects public safety — and they don’t account for the potential benefits of less coercive, less confrontational alternatives to the police. We don’t have as many studies that take those factors into account, but to see the effects in real time, you need only step over the Minneapolis city line.

Golden Valley is a suburb of about 22,000 that in many ways is as idyllic as its name suggests. The median annual household income tops $100,000, there’s very little crime, and 15 percent of the town is devoted to parks and green spaces, including Theodore Wirth Park on its eastern border, a lush space that hosts a bike path and a parkway.

But the town’s Elysian charm comes with a dark past. Just on the other side of the park lies the neighborhood of Willard-Hay. There, the median household income drops to about $55,000 per year, and there’s quite a bit more crime. Willard-Hay is 26 percent white and 40 percent Black. Golden Valley is 85 percent white and 5 percent Black — the result of pervasive racial covenants.

“We enjoy prosperity and security in this community,” said Shep Harris, the mayor since 2012. “But that has come at a cost. I think it took incidents like the murder of George Floyd to help us see that more clearly.” The residents of the strongly left-leaning town decided change was necessary. One step was eliminating those racial covenants. Another was changing the Police Department, which had a reputation for mistreating people of color.

The first hire was Officer Alice White, the force’s first high-ranking Black woman. The second was Virgil Green, the town’s first Black police chief.

 “When I started, Black folks I’d speak to in Minneapolis seemed surprised that I’d been hired,” Chief Green said when I spoke with him recently. “They told me they and most people they knew avoided driving through Golden Valley.”

Members of the overwhelmingly white police force responded to both hires by quitting — in droves.

An outside investigation later revealed that some officers had run an opposition campaign against Chief Green. One of those officers recorded herself making a series of racist comments during a call with city officials, then sent the recording to other police officers. She was fired — prompting yet another wave of resignations.

The typical Golden Valley police officer makes a six-figure salary with good benefits. The city has almost no violent crime. It’s a good gig. Yet in just two years, more than half the department quit.

“I haven’t been on the job long enough to make any significant changes,” Chief Green said. “Yet we’re losing officers left and right. It’s hard not to think that they just don’t want to work under a Black supervisor.”

The interesting thing is that according to Chief Green, despite the reduction in staff, crime — already low — has gone down in Golden Valley. The town plans to staff the department back up, just not right away. “I’ve heard that the police union is cautioning officers from coming to work here,” Mr. Harris said. “But that’s OK. We want to take the time to hire officers who share our vision and are excited to work toward our goals.”

Mr. Harris is quick to point out that Golden Valley may not be the perfect model for the rest of the country. “This is a wealthy community with very little crime,” he said. “We can afford to go through this change. I realize that may not be the case in other places.”

There is reason to think it may. When New York’s officers engaged in an announced slowdown in policing in late 2014 and early 2015, civilian complaints of major crime in the city dropped. And despite significant staffing shortages at law enforcement agencies around the country, if trends continue, 2023 will have the largest percentage drop in homicides in U.S. history. It’s true that such a drop would come after a two-year surge, but the fact that it would also occur after a significant reduction in law enforcement personnel suggests the surge may have been due more to the pandemic and its effects than depolicing.

At the very least, the steady stream of Justice Department reports depicting rampant police abuse ought to temper the claim that policing shortages are fueling crime. It’s no coincidence that the cities we most associate with violence also have long and documented histories of police abuse. When people don’t trust law enforcement, they stop cooperating and resolve disputes in other ways. Instead of fighting to retain police officers who feel threatened by accountability and perpetuate that distrust, cities might consider just letting them leave.

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American Whitelash a book review by Bill Lueders

American Whitelash
A Changing Nation and the Cost of Progress

by Wesley Lowery
Mariner, 272 pp., $28 

A book review by Bill Lueders at Bulwark

IN THE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS for his new book, American Whitelash, Wesley Lowery credits the author, historian, and activist Ibram X. Kendi for making “the crucial suggestion” that he expand his planned focus on white supremacist attacks to include those that were committed during the Obama administration as well as the Trump administration. And so the book begins on November 4, 2008, the day Barack Obama was elected president of the United States. 

Lowery, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has worked for the Washington Post, CBS News, and 60 Minutes, recalls feeling, with some chagrin, that this was “a collective moment of true, unabashed hope.” Obama, in his new role as hopester-in-chief, told a throng of supporters in Chicago’s Grant Park that “America is a place where all things are possible.” Oprah Winfrey gushed, “It feels like there’s a shift in consciousness.” And the New York Times’s front-page story was headlined, “Obama: Racial Barrier Falls in Decisive Victory.”

And then Lowery lowers the boom:

So, what the hell happened? Because it’s clear, with the benefit of even a decade of historical hindsight, that the election of a black president did not usher us from the shadows of our racist past; rather it led us down a perilous path and into a decade and a half (and counting) of explicit racial thrashing. 

Just hours after Obama’s election night address, a church in Springfield, Massachusetts, was set ablaze by three white men who were angry, as one of them told police, that “blacks and Puerto Ricans would now have more rights than whites.” In Staten Island, New York, a group of white teenagers armed with a metal pipe and police baton, drove around beating up black strangers while chanting “Obama.” 

Within a week, Lowery notes, hundreds of racist incidents had been reported across the country, including cross burnings in yards. “It was as if my very presence in the White House had triggered a deep-seated panic, a sense that the natural order had been disrupted,” Obama wrote in his first presidential memoir.

There would be many more reminders during the Obama years of the staying power of racism: the police killings of unarmed black males including Oscar Grant, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Tamir Rice, among others; the water crisis in predominantly black Flint, Michigan; the murder of nine black worshipers by a young white supremacist in a South Carolina church; the career-destroying reaction to Colin Kaepernick’s bent knee in silent protest of police violence. 

Whatever transformative potential the election of the nation’s first black president may have held, it was not realized. And after eight years of bitterness and GOP obstruction of Obama’s agenda, the American public elected Donald Trump, who, in Lowery’s words, “explicitly played to racial discomfort of the Republican Party’s nearly all-white political base.” He quotes CNN commentator Van Jones on the night Trump was elected, using the term that made its way into the title of his book: “This was a whitelash. It was a whitelash against a changing country. It was a whitelash against a black president.”

Trump thrust open the door to fresh waves of bigotry: the ban on Muslims entering the country; the neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville, Virginia; the pandemic that devastated many nonwhite communities with unmitigated force because of inequities in health care. And there were shocking new examples of hatred in its purest form, like the white supremacist on a light rail train in Portland who stabbed three men, two fatally, for intervening to stop his harassment of two black women. The perpetrator later told police, “I hope they all die.”

And Trump left office with an ugly reminder of how manufactured grievance could lead to violence. The events of January 6, 2021, which Lowery notes happened the day after Georgia elected its first black and first Jewish U.S. senators, have morphed into ongoing voter suppression efforts and punishment of elected officials who refused to let Trump steal an election. “To date,” he writes, “this conspiratorial movement remains among the most powerful and mobilized forces within American politics.”

The one constant during these two presidencies, as wildly divergent as they otherwise were, is that racism in America was alive and thriving.

LOWERY SAYS THE GOAL of his book is “to put human faces on the relentless cycle of violence that has defined American history—to put flesh and bone on our discussion of white supremacist terror.” He does so by taking a deep dive into six episodes of racial violence from the Obama and Trump years—four during the former and two during the latter—including the 2012 mass shooting at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, and the 2017 white supremacist marches that turned violent in Charlottesville. All involve pulling at threads of racism that can be found woven throughout the nation’s history.

For instance, in telling the story of Marcelo Lucero, an immigrant from Ecuador who was stabbed to death on the night of November 8, 2008—just four days after Obama’s election—by a gang of teenagers on the prowl for Latinos in Patchogue, New York, Lowery looks at the long history of anti-immigrant sentiment in this nation of immigrants. He goes back to March 1891, when a vigilante mob stormed a jailhouse in New Orleans and lynched eleven Italians accused of being involved in a murder, after some of them were acquitted and before others had even been tried.

The New York Times, in an editorial, derided the victims as “sneaking and cowardly Sicilians, the descendants of bandits and assassins, who have transported to this country the lawless passions, the cut-throat practices, and the oath-bound societies of their native country.” An article in the Washington Post declared: “Last night a body of cool-headed men, lawyers, doctors, merchants, and political leaders, all persons of influence and social standing, quietly met and decided that some action must be taken, and the people’s justice, swift and sure, visited upon those who the jury had neglected to punish.” The president at the time, Teddy Roosevelt, had to say about the bloodshed, in a letter to his sister: “Personally I think it rather a good thing.”

Lowery also explores the 2017 fatal stabbing of Richard Collins III, a black ROTC graduate on the University of Maryland College Park campus, by a white supremacist. He talks to Collins’s father, Rick, who reveals that his own father was shot to death in North Carolina in 1954 after allegedly looking into a neighbor’s window. His killer was set free. The same man lost both a father and a son to racist violence.

It raises the depressing question of whether the two presidencies that Lowery focuses on are really all that exceptional. 

Consider Frazier Glenn Miller Jr.’s methodically planned 2014 shooting spree outside the Jewish Community Center in Overland Park, Kansas, in which three people were murdered. “I’m an antisemite. I hate goddamn Jews,” he told police afterward. “How many’d I get?” (All three of his victims, it turns out, were Christians, but Miller was still took proud ownership of his crime, given that he also hated “accomplices of the Jews.”) 

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Miller was raised to be a racist and an antisemite. He had been a member of the National Socialist Party of America, a Nazi group based in Raleigh, North Carolina, for several years before launching his own group, the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, in 1980. His biases were not shaped by who was president. His whole life was full of hate. He died in prison in 2021.

IBRAM X. KENDI, IN HIS 2016 BOOK Stamped from the Beginning, makes the audacious but compelling argument that racist beliefs do not lead to but result from the ill treatment of black people. He writes: “Time and again, powerful and brilliant men and women have produced racist ideas in order to justify the racist policies of their era, in order to redirect the blame for their era’s racial disparities away from those policies and onto black people.”

Lowery picks up on this thread. 

In other words, faced with the reality that black people are mistreated and that those in power benefit from that ongoing mistreatment, it is not only easier but advantageous to blame the black people—to invent an ideological pseudoscience suggesting that black people must be inherently inferior—than it is to take the public policy steps required to correct the inequality.

The logical corollary is that bigotry can be sapped by going after its motive source: mistreatment, including racist violence. And throughout Lowery’s account are scattered signs of progress being made in that area. Killers are tried and convicted, as justice requires. Legislation to require better reporting of hate crimes stalled under Trump but was signed into law in May 2021 by President Joe Biden. Maryland’s hate crime law was expanded in 2020 after it was deemed not applicable to Collins’s killing. 

Lowery writes about the Black Lives Matter protests in Missouri after the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown, and of the “wave of change brought about by sustained activism” that followed. “Thousands of police departments reviewed their use-of-force policies and implemented body camera programs. A series of states, and some departments themselves, began publishing crucial law enforcement data that shed new light on killings by the police and incidents of alleged brutality.” 

In 2020, he recounts, Ferguson, Missouri elected its first black mayor and installed its first black chief of police; a protester named Cori Bush defeated a longtime Democratic incumbent for the right to represent Ferguson in Congress. Even with Trump in the White House, change was possible, and in some places, it appeared to be gathering momentum.

But for every gain there is a reminder of how far the nation has still to go before racial equality can be achieved. Lowery talks to Zy Bryant, who, as a 15-year-old black ninth-grader in Charlottesville, pushed for the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee from a local public park. “Let’s not forget that Robert E. Lee fought for perpetual bondage of slaves and the bigotry of the South that kept most black citizens as slaves and servants for the entirety of their lives,” she wrote in a 2016 petition that also ran as a letter to the editor. In February the following year, the city council voted 3-2 to remove the statue, prompting the epic wave of whitelash that gripped the city in August 2017, when scores of tiki-torch-carrying neo-Nazis took to the streets chanting “Jews will not replace us!”

This event, and Trump’s jaw-dropping response, has often been cited by Joe Biden as the reason he decided to run for president. The question must be asked: Have Biden’s two-and-a-half years in the White House made racism any less pervasive or corrosive? Are we better people now than we were four years ago?

Lowery is not hugely optimistic. “With the 2024 presidential election fast approaching,” he writes, “it seems almost unquestionable that the race will come accompanied by the course, thoughtless rhetoric that plays into the ongoing American Whitelash and ultimately sets off more acts of white racial terror.” He adds: “It would be nice to be able to conclude that we’ve learned a lesson from this era of American Whitelash, but it’s hard to look at the horizon and not see more horrors to come.”

One reason for this is that Americans have done such a poor job of seeing horrors in the rearview mirror.

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In Tennessee significant relationship between lynchings and death sentences for blacks

 As the Tennessee Department of Correction develops new lethal injection protocols and prepares to resume executions, the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) released a deeply researched report that documents the historical role of racial discrimination and racial terror in Tennessee’s death penalty and details how that history continues to influence the administration of capital punishment.

“The government has a responsibility to treat people of all races equally. As Tennessee considers resuming executions, now is a good time to examine whether the state is meeting that responsibility when it imposes the most severe criminal punishment,” said Tiana Herring, DPIC’s Data Storyteller and the lead author of the report. Tennessee’s history informs today’s practices.

Tennessee was the site of more than 500 lynchings, according to Tennesseans for Historical Justice, and a nationwide study of death sentences between 1989 and 2017 found a significant statistical relationship between a state’s history of lynching and the number of death sentences given to Black defendants. As the report states, “State House Representative Paul Sherrell’s suggestion to allow executions by hanging people on trees earlier this year shows the continued relevance of history.”

The report documents that Tennessee prosecutors are more likely to seek the death penalty, and juries are more likely to impose it, when the victim is white. Of all death sentences imposed in the state since 1972, 74% have involved white victims. The race-ofvictim effect can also be seen in other aspects of the criminal legal system; for example, between 2013 and 2021, 29% of homicides of Black victims in the state went unsolved, compared to 11% of homicides of white victims.

The report highlights how white officials were often complicit when lynchings and other forms of white mob violence occurred. In a not uncommon example: in 1893, a 19-year-old Black man named Lee Walker who was accused of attempting to rape a white woman was lynched after the sheriff ordered his deputies to stand aside when the mob entered the jail. The jailer then gave the mob the key to his cell. As the report states, “Lynchers operated without fear in Tennessee as local authorities regularly refused to investigate lynchings. Law enforcement often concluded that deceased lynching victims had been killed by unknown parties, despite photographic and other evidence proving otherwise.” “Nothing can change the fact that racial violence and discrimination are part of Tennessee’s history. But studying the past can help us understand why racial disparities continue today, especially in our death penalty system, and inform future decisions,” said Robin Maher, DPIC’s Executive Director.

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