Stupid White Men-- and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation! - Michael Moore [86]
“Did you sign it?” asked the judge.
“Yeah,” Kerry replied.
“Why did you sign it?”
“Because they told me to sign it,” Kerry Sanders answered.
Kerry’s public defender was ordered by the judge to review the form again with his client. Within minutes the judge was satisfied, and both the court and the public defender moved on to the next case.
After Kerry Sanders was sold down the river by his L.A. public defender, he was shipped across the country to spend the next two years in Green Haven maximum-security prison, sixty miles north of New York City, where he was sexually assaulted by other inmates.
In October 1995, after federal agents in Cleveland arrested the real Robert Sanders, Kerry Sanders was reunited with his mother, Mary Sanders Lee. Had it not been for the chance arrest of Robert Sanders, Kerry Sanders would still be in prison today.
Kerry was sent home from Green Haven with $48.13, a plastic bag with some medicine, a soda, and a pack of cigarettes. He told his sister, Roberta: “They took me to New York. It was so cold there. They put me in this little room.”
This is not a rare case of the system making a horrible mistake. In a sense, it is not even a mistake. It is the natural result of a society that recklessly locks up anyone who may be a criminal, even if they aren’t a criminal, because it’s better to be safe than right. Our courts are nothing but a haphazard assembly line for the poor to be routed away from us, out of sight—out of my damn way!
Well, this is America, and I guess if it’s good enough to remove thousands of innocent black men from the voting rolls in Florida, it should be good enough to railroad an innocent black man in Los Angeles.
In this assembly-line system of justice, the one thing that mucks up the wholesale delivery of the accused to jail is the jury trial. Why? Because jury trials are shit-disturbers. They force everyone to do their job. The judges, prosecutors, and public defenders do everything in their power to coerce the defendant into accepting a guilty plea to AVOID THE BRUTAL PRISON SENTENCE WE WILL GIVE YOU IF YOU DEMAND A JURY TRIAL. If they can get the defendant not only to plead guilty but also to sign a waiver of his right to appeal, then they’ve hit a home run—and everyone can laugh about it later at the country club.
My sister, Anne, was a public defender in California. She insisted on defending her clients, and getting them a jury trial if that’s what they wanted. For that, she was subjected to incredible harassment from the other PDs in the office. In 1998 the public defender’s office in her county allowed only one felony client out of almost nine hundred defendants to have a jury trial.
Obviously, that didn’t mean every single one of the other 899 accused were guilty. They were just coerced into pleading that way, with many of them ending up in prison, perhaps for crimes they didn’t commit. But we’ll never know, because their Sixth Amendment right to a trial by a jury of their peers was taken from them.
With this standardized railroading of the poor going on daily in every city in America, our justice system has nothing to do with justice. Our judges and lawyers are more like glorified garbage men, rounding up and disposing of society’s refuse—ethnic cleansing, American style.
What happens when this fast-track chute sends innocent people to their death? It took only one college class full of kids at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, to uncover and prove that five individuals on Illinois’s death row were, in fact, innocent. Those students and their professor saved the lives of five people.
If one college class could do that, how many other hundreds of innocent people on death rows across the country are also sitting there awaiting their permanent disposal?
Thirty-eight states have the death penalty. So does the federal government and the U.S. military. Twelve states, plus the District of Columbia (that little piece