Court cases reveal the stench of America’s broken justice system
You’ve probably heard the old political maxim, most popular in the crime-ridden 1970s, that a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged. In the 2020s, it turns out that a criminal justice reformer is now a white dude who suddenly finds himself in jail after taking part in an insurrection to keep Donald Trump in the White House.
Right-wingers busted for taking part in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol — raised in their movement’s “tough on crime” agenda — are now shocked, shocked to learn about conditions in the District of Columbia jail where about 40 of the worst offenders are awaiting trial and complaining about everything from harsh treatment by guards to standing sewage and putrid food. Allies in the Trumpist movement claim this must be political retribution from big-city liberals. Extremist GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia compared them to “prisoners of war.”
But the complaints are almost comical to D.C.-based activists who’ve been railing against these wretched conditions in their majority-Black city for years, only to have their pleas ignored.
The D.C. jail situation feels like a metaphor for a much bigger American phenomenon as 2021 — in which the nation is still trying to come to terms with the upheavals of the prior year, including the violent end to a profoundly criminal presidency and a racial reckoning that sent millions of citizens out into the streets — nears an end.
After Trump and the George Floyd protests, Americans are apprehensively looking for justice — and not liking what they are seeing so far. TV viewers this month have been riveted by the trials of the right-wing vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse and the three men who killed Black jogger Ahmaud Arbery, and frequently appalled by what’s on their screen.
In the Georgia trial of the three white men who confronted Arbery with their unfounded belief he was a burglar and shot and killed him in the ensuing confrontation, the selection of a jury with 11 white members and just one African American (in a 27% Black county) and a defense lawyer’s stunning comment that he didn’t want “Black pastors” as spectators has made folks understandably question how far justice has really advanced in the American South.
The biggest flashpoint so far has been the Kenosha judge, Bruce Schroeder, who is presiding over the homicide trial of Rittenhouse.
From preventing lawyers from calling the men gunned down by the teen as “victims” to blocking prosecutors from bringing up Rittenhouse’s past, including an association with the violent Proud Boys, and also snapping “Don’t get brazen at me!” at them, Schroeder’s conduct has done nothing to reduce fears that this Kenosha trial will put a green stamp of approval on political violence just as it becomes a key tactic of the right.
But ponder this: This is how Schroeder acts when the eyes of the entire nation are thrust upon him! Imagine how justice operates in his courtroom when nobody is looking.
In many ways, the ongoing Jan. 6 investigation is where the rubber hits the road, since the assault on the Capitol — which ended with five dead and scores injured, many police officers — was both the extreme manifestation of the right’s political violence fantasies and possibly a trial run for a next time that could be far worse.
In the sentencing of the mostly smaller fish who’ve pleaded guilty so far, the punishments for participating in an insurrection against the United States government have tended to be much more lenient than for a shoplifter in Kenosha, or a black woman who mistakenly tried (unsuccessfully) to vote, also while on supervision.
That leads to the most important question of all, which is whether President Joe Biden’s deer-in-the-headlights attorney general, Merrick Garland, will somehow summon the courage to do what his predecessors dating back to Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon have not — hold an ex-president in Trump, as well as his inner circle, accountable for their crimes, starting with the insurrection they plotted in open view.
The public anxiety over the trials of Rittenhouse and Arbery’s killers isn’t just over the immediate prospects for injustice but also that the precedent of sanctioned political or racial violence will spread, pandemiclike, to the Jan. 6 aftermath and then to the ultimate terror — that America is lurching toward a next presidential election in which one side will see violence as a legitimate tool for gaining power. And we are seeing nothing in America’s rusted-out and badly bent system of justice that suggests any serious willpower to stop them.