By: Ernest Gurulé
Only in America can news of a global health crisis, one that has claimed the lives of millions and changed the way we live, get kicked off front pages for a couple of courtroom dramas. Yet, as we barrel toward a new year, that is exactly where we find ourselves.
Courtroom dramas, one in Wisconsin, the other in rural Georgia, had Americans devour- ing news of these cases in the same way we might watch big time sporting events. And just as in sports, we saw attorneys ‘working the refs,’ looking for the tiniest openings to exploit both the jury’s emotions and challenge their common sense. Also lingering nearby in both trials—as is the case in history of American justice—were the element of race, jury makeups, guns and vigilantism.
In Wisconsin, a young Whiteman, Kyle Rittenhouse, had gone there in the red hot summer of 2020 and just days after the police shooting of Jacob Blake. Blake was shot seven times in the back by a Kenosha cop. Rittenhouse went there as demonstrations and periodic violence were underway on the pretext of protecting the property of people he neither knew nor knew him and to render aid. Earlier this month he was found not guilty of killing two men and seriously wounding another.
The shootings, which were captured on video, were committed with an assault rifle, a gun the young defendant was not allowed to own in the state he traveled from to be in Wisconsin. He hung his case on self-defense.
In Georgia, a citizens arrest, the premise for the three White men on trial in the death of a Black man jogging on a street not his own, had its own production values. Cell phone video would play a crucial role in the outcome. Again, self- defense was central.
In the Rittenhouse acquittal, critics bemoaned the out- come saying a young Black man carrying an assault weapon would have been stopped by police or worse. They pointed to the 2017 police shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice who was fatally shot by police within seconds for carrying a toy gun.
“I don’t have to tell you this,” said Cornell William Brooks, former president of the NAACP to the website, Playbook, “there is no set of circumstances, no reading of the law, no rendering of the imagination of the imagination, in which a Black person could get away with this.”
In the Georgia case, Glynn County District Attorney Jackie Johnson decided almost immediately that the videotape showing the cornering and ultimate fatal shooting of 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery, was insufficient evidence to charge father and son, Greg and Travis McMichael, with a crime. It was later learned that the older McMichael had once worked as an investigator for Johnson before retiring.
The case went to trial only after Georgia Governor Brian Kemp saw the video and ordered a full investigation. Only then were the pair charged and arrested. Johnson was, herself, later charged with obstruction and violations of oath by a public officer.
Both cases had strikingly similar elements, but their outcomes were dramatically different. Despite video show- ing Rittenhouse walking and running with an assault weapon amidst the chaos of a wild demonstration, despite him falsely identifying himself as a trained paramedic in Kenosha only to render aid and despite what some have called questionable rulings by the judge that may have seemed to favor the defense, the jury found him not guilty on all counts.
But being found not guilty has not passed the ‘smell test’ in the Wisconsin case nor convinced others that race did not play a role in the Rittenhouse trial. “I am convinced that a defendant of color in the Kenosha trial would have dramatically changed the optics…and substantially weak- ened the presumption of innocence,” said Denver attorney Luis Corchado. “It’s a simple truth that people of color do not get the same benefits of the doubt as White defendants.”
A dubious string of high profile cases in which police actions led to the deaths of African American men and women has reignited the debate over fairness in the way people of color are dealt with by police and courts. The justice system is not, itself, on trial.
George Floyd, a Black man, was killed in 2020 when a White Minneapolis police officer placed his knee on his neck for nine minutes. Brionna Taylor was killed in Louisville, Kentucky, in a wrong-address, no-knock raid by Louisville, Kentucky, police. Eric Garner, whose crime was selling ‘loosies,’ individual cigarettes, died when New York cops detained him with a strangle hold. There are others, too, including Sandra Bland, Alton Sterling, Oscar Grant.
Denver attorney and former state legislator Joe Salazar said the country’s record of death by police needs seri- ous and long overdue attention. “When a 17-year-old can leave his state for the purpose of causing trouble (and win acquittal) …that’s pretty much White justice,” he said.
The judge in the Arbury case, said Salazar, got things right when he pointed out the curious makeup of the jury. In the Georgia case, but also the Kenosha case, each jury had only one African American seated. In Kenosha, the city is 20 percent Black. In Glynn County, there is a nearly 30 percent population. “The judge (in Georgia) didn’t set things in motion for anything but for the jury to hear evi- dence,” said Salazar. “That’s social justice.”
The former state legislator who also recently announced his candidacy for the State Senate said both cases repre- sent a warning to America. In the Georgia case, Salazar said, it “demonstrates that a Civil War-type mentality is still alive,” and it’s not just in the South. The Rittenhouse case, he said, also reflects a serious wound in our policing and courts. “There is very much two different types of justice systems in the country.”
Salazar’s last word on Kenosha and Glynn County is stark. “No one is really offering any solutions.” Then again, he said, “None is easy.”
