Looking out: Deflecting shoddy conduct
By Brandon Astor Jones
"It's to impugn someone's integrity, to make it appear that we are soft on crime when the whole so-called criminal justice system in this country is flawed, antiquated and archaic." — Al Lipscomb
Dallas, Texas, former city councillor Al Lipscomb once served 10 months in a California jail for selling heroin in 1951. Today, he is an outspoken activist against the current climate of full-blown political gridlock and posturing. We should not be surprised that most Texas politicians do not like him.
Another political activist, Joyce Ann Brown, has spent time in prison too. Brown served nine years for a fur store robbery. During the course of that robbery the store owner was killed. In 1989, her sentence was overturned by the court because it was obvious that she had been wrongly convicted. Not a lot of Texas prosecutors or politicians like Brown very much either.
What the two African-Americans have in common is their first-hand knowledge of the USA's so-called "criminal justice system". Last spring Brown and Lipscomb were chosen for grand jury duty; indeed, Lipscomb was the foreman of that jury. Time, it seems, has a way of forgiving all real or imagined human errors, but too often US culture cannot forgive ex-convicts as easily as time.
It is my opinion that all juries should have at least one ex-convict on them. Unlike those fortunate souls who have never been to prison, ex-convicts know all the mean-spirited, low down and dirty tricks that prosecutors and police agencies use to legally and properly indict citizens; and they are very apt to share their first-hand knowledge and experience with the other jurors. They know that too often prosecutors and police agencies routinely break the law in their zeal to uphold it.
So when the jury that Lipscomb and Brown sat on threw out no fewer than 400 cases, that angered the district attorney. I do not know how many people it takes to make up a grand jury in Texas, but in most US states the required number is 24. Moreover, of the 1731 cases that Lipscomb and Brown's grand jury heard, it returned 1295 indictments — an indictment rate of 75%. Three other grand juries that were sitting from April through June had indictment rates of 80 and 85%. I assume there were no ex-convicts on those juries.
More recently the district attorney's office has resubmitted 86 of 400 previously rejected indictment requests. A new grand jury has approved 77 of them for indictment. All of this says to me that the district attorneys and police agencies involved resented Brown's and Lipscomb's presence on that grand jury.
I cannot think of a rational reason for such obvious resentment beyond the fact that Lipscomb and Brown are ex-convicts. Can you? When a grand jury, in the interest of justice, seeks truth and prosecutorial integrity in its fact-finding, it is not being "soft on crime" just because it does not find sufficient cause to approve an indictment proposal. When a prosecutor presents to another grand jury the same evidence that a previous grand jury has rejected, that prosecutor is shopping for a jury to suit his or her prosecutorial needs, not justice.
Politicians, prosecutors and others like them use and abuse crime stories and ex-convicts to manipulate public opinions. The general public will have to wake up very soon if anything is to change for the better.
In a September 30, 1994, letter to me, Michael Marcum, the assistant sheriff for the city and county of San Francisco (also an ex-convict who has served five years in prison, and for that reason endures open resentment from many of his subordinate deputies) put it quite succinctly when he wrote regarding crime: "... the issue becomes the central double-speak deflection of a dysfunctional culture".[The writer is a prisoner on death row in the United States. He is happy to receive letters commenting on his columns. He can be written to at: Brandon Astor Jones, EF-122216, G2-51, GD&CC, PO Box 3877, Jackson, GA 30233, USA.]