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Bad luck or racism?

By Jeff Adachi

Jeff Adachi
Adachi

Sixty years ago, a black maid named Lena Baker was tried for capital murder in Georgia. She was charged with shooting a white man who had kidnapped her and threatened her with a metal bar. Her trial, presided over by a white judge and 12 white male jurors, lasted less than four hours. The jury convicted her in less than half an hour, and she was sentenced to die in the electric chair.

Contrast Baker’s case with that of Edgar Ray Killen. Last June, Killen, a former Klansman, was convicted of killing three civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964. The judge gave Killen the maximum sentence of life in prison, but he released him, pending appeal, after he’d served six weeks, saying “the state had not proven that Killen was a flight risk or threat.” While six decades separate these two cases, they illustrate the disparate outcomes for people of color under our system of justice.

Less distant in time are the cases of businesswoman Martha Stewart and rapper Lil’ Kim. While celebrities do not generally provide the best measure of what happens in our justice system, many were surprised when Martha Stewart was actually sentenced to serve five months in a federal prison after she was convicted of obstruction of justice, conspiracy and making false statements. The nation took less notice when Lil’ Kim — convicted of telling a grand jury that she did not recognize two of her close friends at the scene of a crime — was convicted of perjury but acquitted of the more serious charge of obstruction of justice. Lil’ Kim didn’t fare as well as Martha, receiving a sentence of one year in a federal penitentiary.

Sentences handed down for white collar crimes also seem widely disparate from those handed down in drug and weapon cases. WorldCom Executive Scott Sullivan, who played a leading role in WorldCom’s $11 billion accounting fraud and was later convicted of fraud, conspiracy and filing false reports, received a sentence of five years, though he faced a potential sentence of 25 years. Weldon Angelos, a 25-year-old Latino man, was not as lucky. He was sentenced to 55 years with no possibility of parole for a first-time drug offense and possession of a gun.

Martin Grass, the Rite Aid CEO who was convicted of defrauding the nation’s third-largest drugstore chain and shareholders, had his eight-year sentence reduced by the judge to eliminate “disparity between Grass’ sentence and defendants sentenced for similar crimes.” Tammi Bloom was not as fortunate in seeking to reduce her sentence of 19 years for cocaine distribution after cocaine was discovered in a house her husband shared with his mistress. Her motion was denied.

The impact of race on outcomes in the criminal justice system has been the subject of great discussion. A 2000 report issued by the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, entitled “Racial Disparities in the American Criminal Justice System,” points to severe disparities in sentences meted out for drug offenses. Although the majority of crack users in the United States are white, blacks comprised 85 percent of those convicted on crack cocaine charges, Latinos 9 percent and whites 5 percent. Although blacks comprise 12 percent of the population and 13 percent of drug users, they account for 38 percent of all drug arrests and 59 percent of drug convictions.

When sentenced for drug offenses in state courts, whites serve an average of 27 months and blacks an average of 46 months. Black men are incarcerated at 9.6 times the rate of white men, and black women are incarcerated at 8 times the rate of white women. African-American youth are 48 times more likely to be sentenced to a juvenile facility than whites, even though 71 percent of juveniles arrested for crimes are white.

Despite these troubling statistics, many in the legal profession often dismiss evidence of racism in the criminal justice system.

According to an ABA survey conducted in 1999, only 7 percent of white attorneys believed that racism exists, compared to 52 percent of black attorneys. If lawyers refuse to acknowledge the existence of racism, one wonders whether the legal profession can be trusted to correct these inequities.

Institutional racism is defined as “the collective failure of an institution to provide an appropriate and professional service to a person because of their color, culture or ethnic origin.” In Lena Baker’s case, the service she was denied was justice. Her pardon, 60 years later, did Ms. Baker little good. But the outcome is worth noting today, if only because the legal system continues to dole out injustice to those who fall on the wrong side of the tracks.

Jeff Adachi is the San Francisco Public Defender. This column first appeared in The Recorder.

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