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Circumventing Justice: An Indictment of the Grand Jury

12/15/2014

 
It is the duty of prosecutors to pursue criminal charges against a suspect when it’s believed he or she committed a crime. In cases where police officers kill unarmed civilians, the prosecution rarely indicts the perpetrator. This is largely a result of the absolute immunity authorities enjoy, but it also speaks to a reliance upon police expertise on the street. When that “expertise” is wrong or above and beyond the call of duty, and involves the death of innocents, an indictment should be a foregone conclusion. Except it’s not.

It seems as if no life is equal to the preservation of police and prosecutorial supremacy in the eyes of the grand jury. “Authority” trumps justice because fairness gets in the way of dominance. Law and order only applies to unruly minorities, the poor and anyone who has fallen out of favor with the ruling class.

In a typical indictment process the prosecutor gathers enough evidence and witness testimony to prove there is a probable cause, then presents it to the grand jury. It’s a simple procedure, and usually doesn’t take more than a few hours, but there is plenty of room for finagling. The sort that gives credence to the cliché a prosecutor has the power to indict a ham sandwich. Whatever evidence is presented to the grand jury is what the members of that secret body will believe. There is no chance for a defense attorney to object or verify the evidence.

If, for example, Robert McCulloch wanted to indict officer Darren Wilson for killing Michael Brown it would have been easy. All the prosecutor had to do was keep the defendant out of the courtroom and present the gathered evidence like he did for every other case. The grand jury, had this been a typical day in secrecy with an average citizen charged with a crime, would have indicted Wilson for gunning down an unarmed teen from nearly a hundred feet away.

Instead, McCulloch allowed Wilson to defend himself and present testimony contrary to that of numerous witnesses. An official public trial, where the victim is represented by the state, was circumvented in favor of protecting the integrity of the policy. Only the public outcry over the lack of indictment and demonstrations around the country represented Michael Brown’s interests.

Of course this is not an isolated event.

Eric Garner was choked to death by a New York city cop. Apparently the unarmed man, who was not committing any crime and was surrounded by several cops, presented such a threat to the community the grand jury felt the officer was justified in using a banned choke hold to kill an innocent civilian.

If that was not bad enough, twelver-year-old Tamir Rice was shot dead by a Cleveland cop in the same week. I guess a boy with a toy gun is such a threat to the public the cop felt it was necessary to kill him seconds after arriving on the scene. Couldn’t he have at least told the boy to drop the alleged “weapon”? There has been no decision by the grand jury in this case yet, but current trends make it unlikely the officer will be indicted.

Have I mentioned these three victims were blacks in poor neighborhoods and their killers were white police? Is this, as Thomasi McDonald wrote, the new Red Summer of 1919?

While it may be true these are extreme cases going before grand juries under pressure by the powers that seem to favor the police, there is also an underlying culture that makes America seem more like a police state than a democracy. The indictment process is too shrouded in secrecy to be considered fair and is light years away from impartiality. The decisions made by the grand jury should be reviewable like any other decision made in the courts. There should not be a secret body available only to prosecutors for the express purpose of levelling charges. Such life altering decision should be made by a judge in the presence of a court reporter and defense attorney. Like at a preliminary hearing.

The police have a duty to serve and protect all of the public and uphold the law even when it applies to them. It is the grand jury’s duty to determine when a cop violates that ethos, and the prosecutor’s job to recognize an obvious crime when one is committed in plain view of the public. When these parties fail in their duties and are incapable of distinguishing the differences between them it’s time to reform the process and make certain criminals of every caliber are indicted – whether they wear a badge or blindly support one.

Finding the Power IN Writing

12/7/2014

 
In early childhood writing was this difficult task in scrawling the symbols of the English language with little understanding of their purpose. Large, crooked letters staggered like drunks across the page jockeying for position and uniformity. My Rs were often backward, the vowels never really touched the bottom line and I couldn’t quite get the hang of the lowercase k. Their meaning was a vague thing in my mind. I knew the alphabet made words used in speech and books, but that was all. The power of language, a tiny part of a vast universe, was beyond my experience and unimaginable.

Even as I grew and began stringing words together into simple sentences and clunky paragraphs, writing was still only writing. I wrote book reports, thank you notes to relatives, and essays about what I did the previous summer because it was required of me. It was not until junior high school that writing poems or short stories entered the picture, and then only briefly. There was no awareness of what writing can do to readers. I read as much as most kids my age – which is to say not very much – so I didn’t understand the connection between reading and writing for many years to come. It would eventually take prison.

My adolescence was marked by an inability to express my thoughts and emotions. I floundered with how to speak my mind and these unsaid things turned into hungry rats gnawing on my nerves. Communicating as a shy teenager is hard enough, but instead of overcoming my social anxieties and reaching out to those who could help me I chose less idealistic ways. Writing about the difficulties plaguing my life never occurred to me. In my mind there was too much garbage crowding out common sense and good ideas.

My first real understanding of writing as a way of communicating arrived without fanfare. I was locked up in the Maine Youth Center and had no access to a phone. The only way to reach the outside world was by letter and this required a rudimentary knowledge of writing. Most of us asked family members to come visit and bring plenty of change for the vending machines, but there were a few kids who received a lot of mail and responded in kind. They were anomalies.

The letter was our most important method of communication, more so than the sign language used to pass brief, illegal messages, or the war stories about the streets traded in whispers. None of us really viewed writing as anything other than a means to an end. In some cases essay writing was used as punishment by the youth center's staff in an effort to help us understand the errors of our delinquent ways. We resented it and resisted because we didn’t care to see “the big picture”. Our thoughts were for getting back to the excitement of unadulterated freedom – not the benefits of writing.

It was not until my imprisonment on death row at the age of 21 that I began to fully realize how important writing can be. Initially, my letters to friends and family were unclear and fell short of what I wanted to say. How do you explain a situation like facing execution? It took time, a lot of practice, and this overwhelming need to be understood before my writing could evolve enough to help others see from my eyes.

About eight years into my incarceration I was granted the opportunity to enroll in some college courses. Though my education ended with a GED attained when I was 17, I was more than ready to take up the challenge of a higher education. Among the first few things to open my mind was that everything I read had to be conveyed in the clearest possible manner.

Demonstrating this in writing went hand-in-hand with comprehension. Maybe, if I paid more attention in school and didn’t drop out my sophomore year comprehensive reading and writing wouldn’t have seemed like some new and fabulous skill that swelled my chest with its potential.

It helps that since coming to prison I’ve fallen in love with reading. I began reading to take my mind away from the things beyond my control. This in turn revealed to me the power of writing to influence minds. Not exactly new, groundbreaking stuff, but to me this was an epiphany. The writing and psychology courses showed me that reading requires reflection and analysis just like our lives do. Understanding the nuances of the English language and value of being proficient with it has greatly improved how I write and think. Writing makes life possible in any circumstance.

In the years since my incarceration I’ve found that writing is a tool more useful than any other, one that always existed in my life. Since learning how to use it, writing has become a crucial element of my survival in prison because it is the only way I can prove my continued existence to the rest of the world.  Edward Bulver-Lytton may have said the pen is mightier than the sword, but for me it has become the skeleton key for every locked door barring my way. I seek now to find the door it has yet to open, appreciating the power of writing throughout my journey.

Note: This post was entered in the 2015 PrisonReform101.com writing contest.

The Plan

12/5/2014

 
At the Maine Youth Center in ’95, a “Plan” was punishment for minor transgressions such as cursing, yelling, arguing, talking during a silent period and so on. A single-spaced one page essay, the Plan was acknowledgement of what you did, why you did it, and how you would make sure it didn’t happen again. To make the punishment even more dismal, it was administered during the few hours we could watch TV – usually Baywatch, Married with Children and MTV.

Most of us 14-17 year olds hated school for one reason or another and the Plan served as an ugly reminder of that antipathy. It was a boring task made worse with the fear of what happens to those who can’t complete the essay and those bold enough to refuse.

Failing to write a plan for any reason got you sent to an ICP cold cell without clothes or light and a hole in the floor for a toilet. After being put into this cell with the air-conditioner on high there was nothing to do but wait for six long hours. If at the end of this time you still refused to write the Plan, staff gave you a pair of skivvies, a blanket and thin mat, and put you in solitary confinement for seventy-two hours. Continued rebellion increased the time to fourteen days with reduced meals, then thirty days. If at that point, after a month with nothing to do but count cracks in the floor and you still wouldn’t give in, they moved you to the Security Threat Unit, a much more brutal form of solitary confinement.

Most kids were ready to write the Plan after a trip to ICP, especially the younger ones. It’s not like you were allowed to sit in silence during this time; staff typically attended to your miseducation with noise, threats and physical assaults. A few kids went to the ICP cells for three days. Nobody wanted to endure STU. Wherever you ended up, the staff meant to break your will and when that was done, the Plan was waiting.

The easiest way to write a Plan and escape the pressure of the hole involved using a lot of description. Elaborate and verbose details that had little to do with the event under question, or misspelled, half-remembered words glimpsed in a National Geographic magazine – whatever it took to reach the bottom of the page and sound vaguely coherent. With most of the space used to describe the incident, less was needed to explain the “why” of the infraction or the “how” it wouldn’t happen again. It was quicker this way and required minimal thought about personal accountability. In my four stays at the Maine Youth Center, I only wrote a few plans. The last I remember was for talking during a silent period.

“Mr. May, “ said Mr. Lemry. “You’re talking when you should be silent. Grab a pencil and piece of paper, sit in the corner, and write a plan about your runaway mouth and arrogance.”

It helps to have an imagination when writing a plan, and to actually like writing. Some kids broke down in tears at the thought. I didn’t mind writing. By the time I reached the bottom of the page, I had composed an extravagant story about Al Bundy being secretly married to Pamela Anderson’s body double, who also happened to be either Miss September of ’94 or Miss October. I couldn’t remember which and this is why I asked Jeremy. He didn’t know either but had sense enough to shrug. To prevent such a misguided and grievous error in judgment in the future, I would most certainly endeavor to keep my arrogance in check and avoid the displeasure of staff by keeping my mouth shut.

I have often wondered what the staff thought of our Plans. We never received grades or feedback unless it was a demand to write another plan. I thought I saw a staff member smile once but she saw me looking and quickly stopped. In the end it didn’t matter. The Plan was merely a second chance to submit to the will of the authorities and a last chance to avoid the misery of the hole.

    Author

    In the time he has been incarcerated, Lyle May has earned an Associates in Arts degree with a social science emphasis through Ohio University; paralegal certification through the Center for Legal Studies; and is currently working on his bachelor’s degree. He has published two articles in The Wing, an international newsletter for death penalty opponents, and is hard at work writing a second memoir detailing his experiences on death row. When he is not writing Lyle enjoys sci-fi and fantasy novels, calisthenics, and dreams of freedom.

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    Comments

    Lyle welcomes comments to his blog.  However, because Lyle's case is still pending, he will not be able to respond to any questions or comments that you may have.

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