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Can the American Criminal Justice System Survive?
President Trump’s recent pardons of individuals involved in the January 6th Capitol riot have sparked significant debate and concern regarding their impact on the American criminal justice system. These pardons, granted to over 1,500 individuals, including those convicted of violent acts against law enforcement, have profound implications for the rule of law and the perception of justice in the United States.
The twice impeached President is at it again. Last year on January 6, 2021, angry he lost after one term, he incited a mob to storm the United States Congress and placed the lives of Vice President Mike Pence and incoming Vice President Kamala Harris in danger.
This year the angry White man is at it again. During a political rally in Texas on January 29, 2022, the dishonored President incited his followers to stage “the biggest protest we have ever had if they do anything wrong or illegal.” This diatribe is an apparent reference to his and his businesses’ civil and criminal investigations in New York and the criminal investigation underway in Atlanta, Fulton County, Georgia.
Last week President Joe Biden hosted an impressive list of civil rights leaders at the White House. They came to discuss national efforts by Republican officials to restrict voting rights and criminal justice reform considering an alarming uptick in police killing of Black people since the 2008 election of Barack Obama.
I’ve lived through three encounters with the police that could easily have ended in my death. Each time I see another Black man lose his life to a trigger-happy cop; it brings back that same dread I had on those three occasions.
In the mid-1970s, I was a young reporter covering the city hall beat for a Black-owned weekly tabloid. One day I went home for lunch with a couple of girls who worked in the newsroom. They were curious to know how I prepared a vegetarian hamburger. This was decades before the meat alternatives we have on the market today and a lot less appetizing.
Two months after a stunned, pandemic world watched the killing of George Floyd at the corner of 8th Street East and Chicago Avenue, a battery of civil rights attorneys filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the city, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the three cops who participated in Floyd’s death. The lawyers’ chief spokesperson is Benjamin Crump, who has built a cottage industry in police misconduct cases following the Trayvon Martin family’s representation nine years ago.
The novelist and social critic Norman Mailer once wrote, “You can be the best in the world and still lose.” Mailer uttered these profound words to lament his defeat in a race for the office of Mayor of New York City. His prodigious ego led him to believe he was the best candidate in the race. Perhaps history will give him the benefit of the doubt and adjudge Mailer the best novelist turned politician in that contest.
We are excited to announce that Harold Michael Harvey has won a bronze medal from the Living Now Book Awards in the category of male memoirs for his work Freaknik Lawyer: A Memoir on the Craft of Resistance ( Cascade Publishing House, Atlanta, 2019).
Harvey’s book will be featured next year in the Awards section at the prestigious BookExpo America 2021. His novel Paper Puzzle received similar exposure at BookExpo America 2011.
It’s a hard world out there for Black people in America. Especially hard for Black men. When a Black man gets up in the morning, looks in the mirror as he grooms his face, teeth, and hair, he does not know if the executioner will carry out the unspoken death warrant on his life that day.
It is not easy to muster up the strength to walk out the door at the beginning of a new day, even before COVID-2019 arrived in the fall of 2019. The horrors inflicted on Black men in the full light of any given day on any given street in any given park in America sadden my soul.
Two weeks after a father and son duo was arrested for the murder of Ahmaud Arbery in Brunswick, Georgia, a third man, William “Roddie” Bryan, Jr., has been arrested and charged with felony murder and criminal attempt to commit false imprisonment. The GBI lodged Bryan in the Glynn County Jail.
From the very start, Arbery’s family have pled with the authorities to charge Bryan in the death of the Black jogger. Several videos show that Abrery frequently exercised in this predominately white subdivision — where the trio Gregory McMichael, Travis McMichael, and Bryan live.
BRUNSWICK, GEORGIA
Ahmaud Arbrey, a peace-loving Black man, should be alive today, May 8, 2020, to celebrate his 25th birthday. But he will not reach a quarter-century of life because of two Georgia Crackers, Gregory McMichael and Travis McMichael.
This trashy white father and son duo decided Arbrey was a thief and deserved the death penalty three months before his birthday. The McMichael’s were the arresting officers, the judge, jurors, and executioners of Mr. Arbrey, all without legal authority of any kind, except some illusion of white privilege wrapped in racial hatred and lurking in the murky still waters of the “Marshes of Glynn.”