Just Us and Jeff Sessions: Evidence
by Justin Desmangles
"Find
out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the
exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these
will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both.
The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they
oppress." ~ Frederick Douglass, If
There Is No Struggle, There Is No Progress (1857)
In February
of 2007 I was arrested for crimes that I did not commit. Despite my innocence,
I was held for seven weeks at San Francisco County Jail - San Bruno, waiting
for a bail hearing. The District Attorney’s office made an offer. They would
dismiss the felony charges against me in exchange for a guilty plea to a
misdemeanor, sending me back to jail for the year. There was one problem, I
wasn’t guilty of anything. Despite the fact that a felony conviction would lead
to a lengthy prison sentence, I refused the D.A.’s offer and spent the next ten
months fighting my case. It destroyed my life, but I had my freedom in the end.
Despite what
one sees on television and in the movies, juried criminal trials are rare in
America. Typically, a person arrested will be charged with the maximum
penalties available to the arresting officer. A simple jay-walking could be
blown-up to obstructing traffic, adjusting your arms while handcuffed could
become resisting arrest. Police always exaggerate far beyond the reality of the
circumstances they encounter when detaining someone. Making a case for the D.A.
to easily win is part of their job, they believe, and D.A.’s rarely if ever
lose.
Here’s how
it works. The police ramp-up accusations of wrong-doing that are so egregious,
carrying such intimidating punishments, that the D.A. will offer a plea bargain
somewhere in the middle. Most defendants, not all but most, take the plea
bargain as commonsense, being instructed to do so as they often are by legal
counsel. My decision to fight for my freedom is almost unheard of in the
contemporary criminal-justice system, with success falling below single digit
percentiles.
Whether you
are for or against mass incarceration of Blacks and Latinos, the factors
leading to it are invariably the same, racial profiling, prosecutorial
misconduct, and disproportionate sentencing. There is also a profit motive to
keeping millions of Blacks and Latinos locked up, which I will get into a bit
later in this essay.
Racial
profiling has all but been legalized by directives emerging from the Justice
Department under Jeff Sessions, endorsed heartily by Donald Trump, aided and
abetted by a market-driven U.S. culture industry. The flames of irrational fear
are continuously being fanned high by official statements coming from federal,
state, and local law enforcement around the country. Mainstream film and
television broadcasting throw gasoline on that same fire by surreptitiously
presenting images of Blacks, Latinos, and increasingly Muslims, as those of
virulent criminals. It is important here to remember that Jeff Sessions was one
the earliest and most powerful supporters of Trump’s bid for the presidency,
with one of Trump’s earliest institutional endorsements coming from the Fraternal
Order of Police.
Sessions and
the F.O.P. had a long wish list beginning January 20, 2017, and they expected
results. The F.O.P. went so far as to issue a set of policy directives to the
incoming administration the previous month in the form of a press release
titled The First 100 Days. Despite
whatever nonsense corporate news has drummed-up about dissention between Trump
and Sessions, they’ve been getting those wishes fulfilled.
Trump has
enjoyed playing the role of political Santa Claus with many of the most backward
and criminal money-men in the Republican Party, rolling back and rescinding
every Obama era rule and regulation possible.
Here are a
few examples. In late February, 2017, Sessions directed the Justice Department
to end Federal oversight of America’s police departments proven to have
internal cultures of racial prejudice and abuse. The strategy had been
implemented by the Obama administration to fight racial profiling and hold
violent officers accountable. This in the wake of innumerable examples of
brutality and murder that had gone unpunished. That same week, Sessions dropped
any objections on the part of the Justice Department to a Texas voter-identification
law that had been understood by the Obama administration as an unconstitutional
violation of voting rights. That Texas law had been crafted in 2011 by the
Republican Party to further negate the potential votes of Blacks and Latinos,
as well as left-leaning young people, in their state. The Obama administration
had been pursuing the case against Texas since 2013. As the New York Times
correctly observed that month, “Under the Trump administration, the Civil
Rights Division of the Justice Department is expected to undergo the most
severe shift in philosophy of any other section under the Trump administration,
and Mr. Sessions appears to be quickly meeting those expectations.”
By the
second week of March in 2017, Sessions had asked forty-six Obama-appointed U.S.
attorneys in the Justice Department to resign. At the end of that same month,
Sessions released a memo directing all those in the Department to immediately
review activities and investigations “including collaborative investigations
and prosecutions, grant making, technical assistance and training, compliance
reviews, existing or contemplated consent decrees, and task force participation”
to verify that they were in compliance with the Trump administration. The
review of consent decrees was specifically meant to derail Federal
investigations of existing police corruption, specifically in Chicago and
Baltimore.
Returning to
the aforementioned question of minimum sentencing and the radical expansion of
the prison population as a result, it should be remembered that it was Bill
Clinton who championed such measures well over a decade previously. In his
administration’s capitulation to the so-called Gingrich Revolution, Clinton
sponsored the Crime Omnibus Bill, subsequently incarcerating more Blacks and
Latinos than the previous two presidents, Reagan and Bush, combined. During his
wife’s second failed bid for the White House, the former president would
apologize for the insistence on minimum sentencing, underlining it as a mistake
and the root cause of racially biased mass incarceration. The Obama
administration had worked to end the rules that bound judges to impose such
draconian measures, as they had indeed proved to be invariably racist.
By May of
2017, Sessions was directing Federal prosecutors to seek the maximum sentence
possible in all cases, charging defendants with the most severe crimes
available to their circumstances, overturning the Obama administration’s
previous directives. That July, Sessions reversed yet another Obama era rule,
dramatically reinstating property seizures, such as cars and money, of those
accused or suspected of a crime, even if the charges did not necessarily end in
a conviction. Later that month, Trump told police gathered in Long Island for a
speech on illegal immigration not to worry about injuring suspects during an
arrest.
By the end of
summer, Sessions, with Trump’s support, was redirecting the Civil Rights Division
of the Justice Department to investigate race-based preferences in college
admissions. Preferences he viewed as possibly criminal. That September,
Sessions defended far-right activists, including Neo-Nazis, as exercising free-speech
as protected by the constitution. Before the year was out, Sessions would
revoke 25 legal guidance documents used by the Department of Justice since
1975, saying they provoked “confusion.” Just before New Year’s Day, Sessions
would reopen the legal doors to potentially enfranchise debtor’s prisons
nationally for the poor and indigent.
All of which
brings us to today. At the end of February this year, the Supreme Court
reversed an earlier 9th Circuit Court ruling, Jennings v. Rodriguez, thus making it legal to detain immigrants
indefinitely. This decision followed hot-on-the-heels of Sessions abolishment
of an Obama administration rule barring Federal contracting with the private
prison industry. It is no secret that this these for-profit private prisons are
the main artery through which ICE channels those it detains. Many thousands of
those detained are children, all are kept in deplorable conditions with little
of the oversight one finds in government-run facilities. The private-prison
industries are also a major source of funding for Republican candidates
throughout the country.
As if to
open the doors further for this money-making venture disguised as
law-and-order, in early March, Sessions made a rare visit to California’s
capitol, Sacramento, to announce litigation against the state’s “sanctuary
cities.” Sessions delivered his remarks at the 26th annual Law
Enforcement Legislative Day hosted by the California Peace Officers'
Association, saying “California, we have a problem. A series of actions and
events has occurred that directly and adversely impact the work of our federal
officers. For example, the mayor of Oakland (Libby Schaaf) has been actively
seeking to help illegal aliens avoid apprehension by ICE. Her actions support
those who flout our laws and boldly validate the illegality. There's no other
way to interpret her remarks. To make matters worse, the elected Lieutenant
Governor (Gavin Newsome) of this state praised her for doing so. Bragging about
and encouraging the obstruction of our law enforcement and the law is an
embarrassment to this proud and important state. . . . In recent years,
California has enacted a number of laws designed to intentionally obstruct the
work of our sworn immigration enforcement officers--to intentionally use every
power it has to undermine duly-established immigration law in America. . . . California
has also claimed the authority to inspect facilities where ICE holds people in
custody.”
Trump
followed up soon after, using his weekly address to all but declare war on
California, imploring congress to cut-off Federal dollars funding any
municipality that supports “sanctuary” policies for immigrants. Trump stated
unequivocally, “The State of California is sheltering dangerous criminals in a
brazen and lawless attack on our Constitutional system of government. Every state in our Union is subject to the
laws and Constitution of the United States – including California. Yet California’s leaders are in open defiance
of federal law. They don’t care about crime. They don’t care about death and
killings. They don’t care about robberies. They don’t care about the kind of
things that you and I care about.”
Soon after,
an official spokesman for ICE in California, James Schwab, resigned in protest,
citing both Sessions and Trump’s exaggerations of the threats posed by
immigrants in California. Speaking to the San
Francisco Chronicle, Schwab said, “I quit because I didn’t want to perpetuate
misleading facts. I asked them to change the information. I told them that the
information was wrong, they asked me to deflect, and I didn’t agree with that.
Then I took some time, and I quit.”
While the
threat of so-called illegal immigration to the United States has most certainly
been exaggerated by both Sessions and Trump, their very real threats to
California cannot be overstated. Unlike
the Eastern states, or even those of the Mid-West and South, California was
never entirely settled. These new threats are attempts to do just that in
classic circle-the-wagons settler fashion. In point of fact, the 19th
century was all but half-way over before California even joined the Union. Its
status within the Republic has always occupied both the center and the absolute
margins, socially, politically, economically, culturally. The Trump-Sessions
junta in American politics should not only be supremely resisted, it should be
destroyed. California is the only state with the power to do so with a democratic super-majority, leading the nation as it has in the past.
As it
stands, another Obama policy upended by Trump at the behest of the F.O.P. and
enthusiastically embraced by Sessions, is the continued arming of local police
forces with military-grade arms and equipment. Gifts from Homeland Security and
the Department of Defense. As all of the above changes continue unabated, it
will not be long before we see more and more of this type of equipment being
deployed by local police forces, as we did in Ferguson, MO. and Baltimore, MD.
ICE and the
Justice Department are spoiling for a fight, particularly in Oakland,
California and the greater Bay Area, as they made excruciatingly clear in the
early weeks of March, 2018.
In the late
1940’s, the jazz standard, Just You, Just
Me, was transformed by Thelonious Monk, becoming the original composition Just Us, later titled Justice, and finally known as Evidence. I think he had a point. Without
evidence there will be no justice, and without either, it will stay just us,
and if we’re not careful, each one of us will be left saying “just me.”
(this essay was originally published March 22, 2018 in Konch)
