The gay marriage debate is gradually bringing clarity to a complex subject. Americans oppose gay marriage for a variety of reasons. Some believe they are forced to choose between accepting “the gay lifestyle” and the teachings of Scripture. Others are primarily concerned about preserving strong traditional families. And then there are those who, lacking any first-hand association with actual gay men and lesbians, allow unsympathetic, and often lurid, stereotypes to fill the void.
People of faith sometimes fear that the legalization of gay marriage will force pastors and churches to go against deep personal and traditional conviction. Not so, says Melissa Rogers. After paying careful attention to the totality of President Obama’s remarks, she makes some crucial distinctions in this brief article originally published by the Huffington Post and the Associated Baptist Press.
In the wake of President Obama’s declaration of his personal support for the right of same-sex couples to marry under civil law, the nation is understandably focused on debating the merits of this position. Three related points from President Obama’s announcement, however, deserve our attention as well.
First, President Obama noted that there is an important difference between civil marriage and religious marriage. The state defines civil marriage, which serves as the gateway for a wide variety of government benefits, rights and privileges. Religious marriage, on the other hand, is defined solely by religious communities.
These categories may be fuzzy in our minds because current law not only respects the ability of clergy and religious communities to define and bless religious marriage, it also allows clergy to solemnize civil marriage. That’s why one often hears a minister conclude a wedding by saying, “By the authority vested in me by the state of X, I now pronounce you husband and wife.” (more…)
Dallas County DA Craig Watkins is morally opposed to the death penalty, yet he continues to ask juries to sentence defendants to death. Professor Rick Halperin wants to know why.
Technically, the answer is simple. Prosecutors are public servants, politicians really, and are thus accountable to the wishes of the constituency they represent. A solid majority of Dallas County residents favors capital punishment, so Craig Watkins bows to their preferences.
Prosecutors who personally oppose the war on drugs, by the same reasoning, continue to indict drug dealers because it’s the law. Prosecutors, judges, and defense attorneys, the theory goes, are obligated to enforce rules created by others.
Lawyers can do things the rest of us cannot. We cannot prosecute or defend suspected criminals, for instance, nor can we preside at trial–those roles have been delegated to particular legal professionals. But we must also realize that legal professionals are shackled to the rules of their profession in ways that can be quite limiting. This may be necessary, but it minimizes their ability to argue that the emperor has no clothes. According to legal theory, the emperor is fully clothed by definition.
It is generally assumed that people advocating for criminal justice reform should be trained attorneys, and many aspects of advocacy work do require legal expertise. But we also need non lawyers like Rick Halperin in the game.
In her wildly successful The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness, Michelle Alexander underscores the need for grassroots advocacy.
Not surprisingly, as civil rights advocates converted a grassroots movement into a legal campaign, and civil rights leaders became political insiders, many civil rights organizations became top-heavy with lawyers. This development enhanced their ability to wage legal battles but impeded their ability to acknowledge or respond to the emergence of a new caste system. Lawyers have a tendency to identify and concentrate on problems they know how to solve—i.e., problems that can be solved through litigation. The mass incarceration of people of color is not that kind of problem. (p. 214)
The argument that prosecutors opposed to the death penalty must nonetheless ask juries for death sentences is driven by Alice in Wonderland logic. Thanks to Dr. Halperin for pointing that out. Thanks also to the wonderful Dallas South Blog for printing this story. (more…)
I frequently tell audiences how our family was virtually excommunicated from polite society when we questioned a corrupt drug bust in Tulia, Texas. I write about this bewildering experience in my book, Taking out the Trash in Tulia, Texas. In the eyes of respectable, church-going folk, we were just flat wrong. From this mainstream perspective, our stand looked crazy, illogical, and possibly even demonic.
Moral perception involves a subtle interplay between personal experience and community narrative, the value-laden stories we grow up listening to. The Horatio Alger, rags-to-riches story is a classic example of a value-laden story; so is the story of Rosa Parks, the Black seamstress who refused to give up her seat on the bus. Community narratives are the stories that define a culture. If you are part of the culture, you hear the stories.
Both personal experience and community narrative vary tremendously from culture to culture. In Black communities, for instance, children grow up hearing stories about the need to persevere in the face of prejudice and rejection. Personal experiences are interpreted through a narrative lens fashioned by this community narrative. “Oh, so that’s what daddy was talking about,” we tell ourselves.
In White culture, community narrative tends to validate authority figures and the social status quo. “Police officers are there to protect you, Johnny,” White parents tell their children, “so you shouldn’t be afraid of them. I know that gun looks scary, but he will only use it on the bad guys.” In general, personal experience bears out this expectation.
You hear very different stories in Black and Latino communities. Authority figures aren’t demonized in the moral narratives that circulate in minority communities, but they are viewed with a measure of suspicion. You don’t always call the police when something bad goes down on the street; innocent people might get hurt. And when a family member is facing trial no one expects equal justice. Personal experience tends to validate this community narrative.
One consequence of being excommunicated from Tulia’s respectable white community was spending a lot of time with Black and Latino residents. On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was in Albuquerque witnessing a debate between Asa Hutchison of the Drug Enforcement Administration and New Mexico governor Garry Johnson. We were primarily there to talk to both sides about what was happening in Tulia.
The planes hit the Twin Towers just as we were packing for our return trip and we listened to updates on public radio all the way back to Tulia. In the van with me were several members of Tulia’s black community, most of them associated with the Church of Christ. They were appalled by events in Manhattan, but they weren’t surprised. In fact, they wondered why it had taken so long. A simple phrase was repeatedly endlessly, “America’s chickens are coming home to roost.”
I thought of that road trip seven years later when Jeremiah’s incendiary rhetoric played a central role in the electoral campaign between John McCain and Barack Obama. “No, no, no,” Wright roared, “Not ‘God bless America. “God damn America.”
When I first saw the clip of Reverend Wright in full cry I was reminded of Billy Graham’s remark that if God didn’t punish America He would have to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah. Wasn’t Jeremiah Wright saying much the same thing?
Yes and no. When Billy Graham suggested that the wrath of God would soon fall on America he was speaking out of the moral narrative he grew up hearing in Baptist circles in North Carolina. Like ancient Israel, America is called to be a chosen people, a city set upon a hill. But we will only be blessed insofar as we remain faithful to our calling. Our tolerance for lewd music, R-rated movies, gambling and general debauchery is a rejection of our Godly birthright and will inevitably lead to divine judgment.
Jeremiah Wright was thinking of a different community narrative when he delivered his infamous sermon in the wake of 9-11. America flatters itself as a beacon of democracy, but we prop up tin pot dictators in to enhance the profits of multinational corporations even if it spells untold suffering for millions of people. Did we think God would turn a blind eye to such cruel hypocrisy forever?
Graham and Wright applied the same Deuteronomic logic to very different facts. One was lionized for speaking hard truths; the other was demonized as an anti-American racist. Until you step into a Black barber shop and ask the brothers for their take.
From the dominant White perspective (liberal and conservative) Jeremiah Wright was talking crazy. How could anyone be so insensitive in the wake of the worst national disaster in recent memory?
This explains why a super PAC funded by TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts plans to use the president’s historic ties to Jeremiah Wright to bring about ‘The Defeat of Barack Hussein Obama’. The assumption is that Wright’s “God Damn America” rhetoric is so extreme that White Democrats will dissociate from the president while Black America will be silenced.
If this ad airs (and since a prototype has been leaked to the media, there is a chance it may not) Black America will not take it lying down. Instead, attempts will be made to humanize Reverend Wright by placing his remarks in social and historical context.
I hope the ad envisioned in the prototype never materializes; but if it does, the moral divide separating Black and White America will be more apparent than it has been since the halcyon days of the Civil Rights Movement.
In 1989, Carlos DeLuna was executed for the killing of a gas station attendant in Corpus Christi, TX. His conviction rested solely on eyewitness testimony. Over twenty years after his execution, the Columbia Human Rights Law Review has published a report stating that DeLuna was not the murderer.
In reality, the murderer was most likely another Carlos, Carlos Hernandez. Hernandez was also at the scene of the crime, but fled in the other direction while police detained DeLuna. Despite DeLuna’s pleas of innocence and the prosecution’s lack of reliable evidence, DeLuna was found guilty of murder. And an innocent man was executed.
Sadly, this is just another chilling tale of our flawed justice system. MWN
He was the spitting image of the killer, had the same first name and was near the scene of the crime at the fateful hour: Carlos DeLunapaid the ultimate price and was executed in place of someone else in Texas in 1989, a report out Tuesday found.
Even “all the relatives of both Carloses mistook them,” and DeLuna was sentenced to death and executed based only on eyewitness accounts despite a range of signs he was not a guilty man, said law professor James Liebman.
Liebman and five of his students at Columbia School of Law spent almost five years poring over details of a case that he says is “emblematic” of legal system failure.
DeLuna, 27, was put to death after “a very incomplete investigation. No question that the investigation is a failure,” Liebman said. (more…)
The New Orleans Times-Picayune spent a full year answering a simple question: why does the state of Louisiana lock up more of its citizens than any other jurisdiction on the face of the earth.
There are a number of answers to this question, but the big engine driving mass incarceration in Louisiana is money. Back in the 1980s, with jails and prisons overcrowded and nowhere to place the overflow, legislators decided to sweeten the pot for the parish sheriffs who rule the Louisiana hinterland. As a result, dozens of small communities are addicted to the incarceration business. Over half of the state’s inmates are currently locked up in Parish institutions or facilities run by private prisons like LaSalle Corrections. Consider this quick quote:
A drop in the incarceration rate could spell doom for both LaSalle Corrections and the sheriffs. The Louisiana Sheriffs’ Association lobbies extensively on its members’ behalf and funds campaigns through a related political action committee. Private prison companies have the resources to be major political donors themselves. With strategically placed contributions, they can influence legislation as well as potentially steer inmates to their own prisons.
When thousands of public and private jobs depend on full prisons, the prisons will be full and God help anyone foolish enough to stand in the way.
The result is that Louisiana inmates doing three or four years for check fraud and first-offense drug crime are given virtually no vocational training while inmates doing life at state facilities like Angola learn valuable skills they will never be able to invest in the free world.
JONESBORO — Clay McConnell is an unlikely scion for a prison empire. An ordained minister, his curly brown hair is fashionably rumpled, and he gets flustered when speaking in front of a video camera. His father, Billy, is the brains behind LaSalle Corrections, the one who expanded the family business from senior citizens to criminals. (more…)
This Pro Publica report recently appeared in the Washington Post. The story focuses on the story of a single inmate, Clarence Aaron, but his plight is hardly unique. Consider these depressing realities:
The number of pardons awarded has declined sharply in the past 30 years, as have commutations. Obama has rejected nearly 3,800 commutation requests from prisoners. He has approved one. Bush commuted the sentences of 11 people, turning down nearly 7,500 applicants . . .
Between 1980 and 2010, requests for commutations rose sharply, reflecting lengthier sentences and the elimination of paroles for federal inmates, while the number of successful applicants plummeted.
Under Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, both two-term presidents, one applicant in 100 was successful. Under Bush, approvals fell to barely better than one in 1,000.
The work of the pardon office has come under heightened scrutiny since December, when ProPublica and The Washington Post published stories showing that, from 2001 to 2008, white applicants were nearly four times as likely to receive presidential pardons as minorities.
Why have American presidents become progressively unwilling to show compassion? As the article below suggests, bureaucratic logistics is part of the problem. Writer Dafrna Linzer is critical of “the extraordinary, secretive powers wielded by the Office of the Pardon Attorney, the branch of the Justice Department that reviews commutation requests.”
But there is more at work here than a disconnect between a shadowy office in the Justice Department and the White House. Presidents have not grown more heartless over the years, but their political handlers have become more attuned to the punitive consensus that has driven public policy decisions since Nixon backlash of 1968. Put simply, there is little downside to turning down an application for clemency and little upside to granting one. If Barack Obama made these decisions on the basis of personal conviction he would likely release hundreds of thousands of prisoners tomorrow. But personal conviction means little to a left of center politician facing a right of center electorate. Nancy Reagan’s “Just say no” may not help adolescents hew to the straight and narrow; but these three simple words have governed the pardon and commutation game throughout my adult life.
This issue is personal for me. Friends of Justice is part of a national movement calling on President Obama to commute the sentence of Ramsey Muniz, a federal prisoner who we feel was wrongfully convicted in 1994.
The significant minority of inmates who are innocent but cannot prove it beyond a reasonable doubt are particularly vulnerable in this respect. They are far more likely than guilty inmates to roll the dice with the jury, when the dice don’t roll to their liking, they are typically sentenced to much longer sentences than a plea bargain would have delivered, and finally, when they apply for commutation they are unable to show the kind of contrition Mr. Aaron has displayed.
If you are a person of color, the chances of commutation drop close to zero.
Clarence Aaron seemed to be especially deserving of a federal commutation, an immediate release from prison granted by the president of the United States.
At 24, he was sentenced to three life terms for his role in a cocaine deal, even though it was his first criminal offense and he was not the buyer, seller or supplier of the drugs. Of all those convicted in the case, Aaron received the stiffest sentence.
For those reasons, his case for early release was championed by lawmakers and civil rights activists, and taken up by the media, from PBS to Fox News.
And, ultimately, the prosecutor’s office and the sentencing judge supported an immediate commutation for Aaron.
Yet the George W. Bush administration, in its final year in office, never knew the full extent of their views, which were compiled in a confidential Justice Department review, and Aaron’s application was denied, according to an examination of the case by ProPublica based on interviews with participants and internal records.
That Aaron joined the long line of rejected applicants illuminates the extraordinary, secretive powers wielded by the Office of the Pardon Attorney, the branch of the Justice Department that reviews commutation requests. Records show that Ronald Rodgers, the current pardon attorney, left out critical information in recommending that the White House deny Aaron’s application. In a confidential note to a White House lawyer, Rodgers failed to accurately convey the views of the prosecutor and judge and did not disclose that they had advocated for Aaron’s immediate commutation.
Kenneth Lee, the lawyer who shepherded Aaron’s case on behalf of the White House, was aghast when ProPublica provided him with original statements from the judge and prosecutor to compare with Rodgers’s summary. Had he read the statements at the time, Lee said, he would have urged Bush to commute Aaron’s sentence.
The work of the pardon office has come under heightened scrutiny since December, when ProPublica and The Washington Post published stories showing that, from 2001 to 2008, white applicants were nearly four times as likely to receive presidential pardons as minorities. The pardon office, which recommends applicants to the White House, is reviewing a new application from Aaron. Without a commutation, he will die in prison.
Through the Justice Department, Rodgers declined repeated requests for an interview, and the department itself declined to comment on any aspect of the Aaron case, citing “privacy and privilege concerns.”
“Every clemency request — whether it be for commutation of sentence or for pardon — is considered carefully and thoroughly by the Office of the Pardon Attorney,” spokeswoman Laura Sweeney said.
“We cannot improve or strengthen the exercise of this power without taking it out of the Department of Justice,” Craig said.
He advocated for a bipartisan review panel that would report directly to the president.
The number of pardons awarded has declined sharply in the past 30 years, as have commutations. Obama has rejected nearly 3,800 commutation requests from prisoners. He has approved one. Bush commuted the sentences of 11 people, turning down nearly 7,500 applicants.
A former pardon office lawyer said some applicants have been turned down “en masse” with little, if any, review, a claim the Justice Department disputes.
Aaron, now 43 and in his 19th year behind bars, had not known how close to success his request had come, or what had barred his way, until he was contacted by ProPublica. Still, he said, it gave him hope.
“I didn’t know I had that type of support” from the judge and prosecutor, he said in a phone interview from the Alabama correctional facility where is held. “When you do the right things each day, there really are people out there watching, and for those who still haven’t given me their support, I will keep working for them, too.”
Aaron’s arrest
Aaron stumbled into the “war on drugs” near its peak, in 1992. Then a linebacker at Southern University in Baton Rouge, he introduced a classmate whose brother was a drug supplier to a cocaine dealer he knew from high school in Mobile, Ala.
Aaron was present for the sale of nine kilograms of cocaine and the conversion of one kilogram to crack, according to court records. He was paid $1,500 by the dealer.
After federal authorities busted the ring and the case went to trial, Aaron claimed his role was so limited that he knew almost nothing about the deal. But he refused to testify against friends, and others fingered Aaron as a major player and testified against him in exchange for reduced sentences.
Though it was Aaron’s first criminal offense, he received the stiffest sentence of anyone involved in the conspiracy. Only Aaron and the drug supplier, who is scheduled to be released in 2014, remain behind bars.
Aaron’s case gained national attention in 1999 when he appeared in “Snitch,” a PBS “Frontline” documentary about prisoners serving long sentences after refusing to turn informant. The film helped him garner support in Congress and from civil rights organizations.
In January 2001, Aaron submitted an application for a commutation. He faced a high hurdle.
Between 1980 and 2010, requests for commutations rose sharply, reflecting lengthier sentences and the elimination of paroles for federal inmates, while the number of successful applicants plummeted.
Under Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, both two-term presidents, one applicant in 100 was successful. Under Bush, approvals fell to barely better than one in 1,000.
Aaron’s high profile boosted his chances, as did his track record as a model inmate. He wrote in an amended petition that he was deeply ashamed of his actions and felt “terrible remorse. I also regret that I further compounded my mistake by not admitting to my participation at trial.”
But his petition had a critical weakness.
U.S. Attorney David York, the top prosecutor for the Southern District of Alabama, opposed reducing Aaron’s sentence.
In 2004, then-Pardon Attorney Roger Adams recommended the White House deny Aaron’s request. Adams said in a recent interview that he wrote the recommendation with some ambivalence.
“Anyone who looks at Clarence Aaron will see a really, really tough case of a young guy in prison for the rest of his life,” Adams said.
His report went to the White House, where it sat for three years among a growing stack of recommendations.
A cursory review
In 2008, Rodgers, a former military judge and federal prosecutor, took over the pardon office and changed the way it handled commutation applications.
Under Rodgers’s predecessors, staff lawyers reviewed each case, gathered pre-sentence and Bureau of Prisons progress reports and wrote recommendations based on their research.
“Some reports were shorter, just a paragraph or two,” said Margaret Love, who served as a pardon attorney from 1990 to 1997. “But there was always enough of a report that you could get an idea of what the basic facts and issues were.”
For the first 21 / 2 years under Rodgers, however, most petitions were handled by paralegals, not staff attorneys, and recommended for denial in batches, said Samuel Morison, a lawyer who spent more than a decade in the pardons office before leaving in 2010 to work for the Defense Department. He said Rodgers instituted the change when there was a significant backlog.
“The office types up a list of names, along with basic sentencing and offense information for each prisoner, and sends the list to the White House with a note that says the attached cases are meritless and should be denied,” Morison said.
At the end of 2010, Rodgers reverted to the old system. He now assigns a lawyer, along with paralegals, to review commutation requests, the Justice Department said.
Still, in the past four years, applications from more than 7,000 prisoners have been denied — 22 times as many as were rejected during Reagan’s eight-year presidency.
The Justice Department insists the accelerated process did not mean applicants got short shrift.
Rodgers “personally reviewed every application for commutation of sentence before recommending their disposition,” a Justice Department official said.
A nine-year odyssey
The White House sent Aaron’s application back to the pardon office for reconsideration in early 2008 as part of a larger push to find clemency candidates.
According to former White House counsel Fred Fielding, his staff had become frustrated by the lack of positive recommendations from the pardon office. In Bush’s final year in office, lawyers began searching through denial recommendations for promising cases and found Aaron.
This time, key elements shifted in Aaron’s favor. Unlike her predecessor, Deborah J. Rhodes, the new U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Alabama, supported the petition.
“I have reviewed various documents submitted by Clarence Aaron in support of his petition for commutation of sentence and agree that Aaron should receive a commutation of his life sentence,” her November 2008 memo to Rodgers began.
Rhodes suggested Aaron’s triple life sentence be commuted to the equivalent of a 25-year sentence, with credit for good behavior. Under this calculation, Aaron would be released in 2014.
U.S. District Court Judge Charles Butler Jr., who had sentenced Aaron, changed his earlier stance of no position, opting this time to support commutation.
“Looking through the prism of hindsight, and considering the many factors argued by the defendant that were not present at the time of his initial sentencing, one can argue that a less harsh sentence might have been more equitable,” he wrote in response to a motion filed by Aaron’s attorneys.
In a phone interview with the pardons office on Dec. 2, 2008, Butler told Morison, the lawyer in the office, that Aaron “should be granted relief” by the president immediately.
Morison sent an e-mail to Rodgers sharing his transcribed notes from the call with Butler. Morison asked Rodgers if he should update the draft recommendation on file for Aaron’s release in light of the views expressed by Rhodes and the judge. Rodgers responded minutes later: “Thanks Sam. I’ll take it from here.”
Instead, Rodgers offered no new recommendation to the White House and did not revise the old one. He did not pass on years of favorable prisoner reports describing Aaron’s successful rehabilitation. He also made no mention of an affidavit Aaron filed with the pardons office in 2007 in which he expressed further remorse and asked “for a second chance to be a productive citizen.”
Rodgers resubmitted the 2004 denial recommendation, unchanged, to the White House.
In an e-mail the next day to Kenneth Lee, associate White House counsel, Rodgers did not disclose that Rhodes and the sentencing judge now agreed that Aaron should receive an immediate commutation. He told Lee that Rhodes suggested Aaron’s sentence should be commuted to a term of 25 years “at some point.” Rodgers also said that Rhodes believed “Aaron’s commutation request is about 10 years premature.”
No such language is in Rhodes’s memo.
All Rodgers told the White House about Butler’s views was that the judge had “no objection to commuting the sentence presently.”
Rhodes would not comment on Rodgers’s handling of the petition except to reiterate that she had recommended an immediate commutation for Aaron.
“I reviewed the case myself and thought it was a good one,” she said.
Butler declined to comment for this story.
The Justice Department would not answer questions about the way Rodgers characterized the views of Rhodes and Butler, or how Rodgers had arrived at his recommendation on Aaron.
Lee, the former associate White House counsel, said Rodgers had presented the views of Rhodes and Butler “in the least favorable light to the applicant.”
Referencing ProPublica’s findings on presidential pardons — that whites were nearly four times as likely to be pardoned as minorities — he also expressed concern that the office’s approach to the case could have been affected by race. Aaron is African American.
“Had we known before about a potential subconscious bias in the office,” Lee said, “we would have liked to look at the actual letters in the Aaron case rather than rely on the pardon attorney’s summary.”
In response to the ProPublica findings, the Justice Department said it took the concerns seriously and was reviewing the statistical analysis in the article.
Talladega
Aaron remains in a federal penitentiary in Talladega, Ala.
He spent the first dozen years of his sentence at maximum security prisons in Florida and Georgia, where he completed a two-year religious-studies correspondence course through Emory University. He also took courses in microeconomics, Spanish, photography and behavioral development
In 2007, he was transferred to the medium-security facility in Talladega, where he helped bring a new textiles factory online and works as a clerk, assisting the factory accountant.
“A lot of people think I’m crazy, to do self-help programs and stay out of trouble with a sentence like mine,” Aaron said. But “from the first day I walked into the federal prison system, I just continued to better myself and educate myself.”
He’s acutely aware of all the milestones he has missed — family birthdays, his college graduation. In 2005, his younger sister Stephaine died suddenly during radiation treatment for skin cancer. Aaron said he calls her daughters every week.
Bush formally denied Aaron’s request on Dec. 23, 2008. Aaron learned of the decision three weeks later when Rodgers sent formal notification to his attorney.
In April 2010, Aaron submitted a new petition for commutation. It is pending.
“If I was to be granted that commutation,” Aaron said, “the president who backed me wouldn’t regret it, because I would work hard every day to prove my worthiness.”
ProPublica is an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest.
The government targeted Ramsey Muñiz on the uncorroborated word of a major narcotic importer. Then, by withholding this information, they made it impossible for the sharpest defense attorney in Texas to challenge their case until it was too late.
By Alan Bean,
Friends of Justice
“People want me to express remorse,” Ramsey Muñiz once told me. “How do you express remorse for something you didn’t do?”
In the eyes of the law, Ramiro “Ramsey” Muñiz is a convicted drug dealer who refuses to take responsibility for his actions.
In a federal trial in 1994, a Texas jury found Muñiz guilty of participating in a narcotics conspiracy. Because he had two prior convictions, federal law dictated a life sentence without possibility of parole.
A growing community of supporters is asking President Barack Obama to commute Ramsey’s sentence on humanitarian grounds. Ramsey Muñiz is approaching his seventieth birthday and, after a serious fall, he can no longer walk without the assistance of a cane. What good is accomplished, they ask, by keeping such a man in federal custody?
Muñiz during his La Raza Unida days
Others believe Muñiz was targeted as part of a political vendetta. Twice in the early 1970s, Ramsey was a gubernatorial candidate on the La Raza Unida ticket. Following a college football career with the Baylor Bears, Muñiz graduated from the university’s law school. Handsome, charismatic and tireless, Ramsey’s political campaigns galvanized the Latino community, especially in the Rio Grande Valley. According to some of his stalwart supporters, Ramsey’s Anglo opponents used the war on drugs to humiliate a Latino icon.
So, who is Ramsey Muñiz?
Is he the civil rights leader who shook up Texas politics? This is how Ramsey is remembered by his old friends from the halcyon days of La Raza Unida.
Is he the well-connected legal professional with a passion for defending young marijuana defendants? This is how his colleagues in the legal community remember him.
Is he a mystic-in-chains whose suffering has drawn him into deep communion with the crucified Christ? This is the Ramsey who greets a steady stream of visitors at the Beaumont Medium prison.
Or is Muñiz just an unprincipled opportunist who used his professional standing as a front for get-rich-quick drug deals? This is how Muñiz was portrayed in a federal courtroom in 1994, and it is how he is still regarded in the eyes of the law.
When a man is driving a car with 40 kilos of powdered cocaine in the trunk he certainly looks guilty. But who put the drugs in the car, and did Ramsey know the drugs were there?
This wasn’t the first time the hero of the Chicano movement was associated with the drug business. In 1976, Ramsey was accused of participating in a conspiracy to import marijuana into the United States. A young co-defendant negotiated a dramatic sentence reduction by agreeing to name every person who had been present when the importation of marijuana was discussed. Ramsey Muñiz was one of the names.
Like most Latinos in South Texas, Muñiz regarded marijuana as the moral equivalent of beer or wine; a common feature of social life that posed no moral problems when used in moderation. But when the Nixon administration associated the prolific plant with hippies, Mexicans and radical war protesters, the war on drugs was born.
Many former supporters were dismayed when Muñiz entered a guilty plea. He was a lawyer, not a drug dealer, so why was he going down without a fight?
Muñiz was uniquely vulnerable to federal narcotics conspiracy charges. Many of the leading marijuana importers in the Rio Grande Valley came from socially prominent families who had supported La Raza Unida in the early 1970s and regarded Ramsey Muñiz as a celebrity figure. According to federal law, a defendant can participate in a conspiracy without knowing all of his co-conspirators and with only scant information about the nature of the conspiracy. You don’t even have to profit personally. If you know illegal transactions are taking place and you fail to blow the whistle, you are part of the conspiracy.
Muñiz freely admits that he was privy to conversations related to marijuana importation. He thought he was protected from prosecution by attorney-client privilege. He was wrong.
Humiliated by his dramatic fall from grace, Muñiz wanted to disappear as quickly, quietly and completely as possible. Two virtually identical cases had been filed on the basis of the same conspiracy allegations, one in San Antonio, the other in Corpus Christi. After taking a plea offer to avoid the humiliation of trial, Ramsey was sentenced to two consecutive five-year terms and shipped off to McNeil Island, a prison on the Washington State coast commonly reserved for gang members.
After serving half his term, Ramsey Muñiz returned to the free world and, having forfeited his law license, began a new career as a paralegal. His specialty was helping Anglo attorneys communicate with Latino clients. To his great surprise, his time in prison had given him instant credibility with drug defendants and their families. They assumed that a man who had done time would understand the fear and confusion they were feeling.
They were right. Ramsey knew too much about the routine horror of prison life to be blasé about the consequences of a narcotics conviction. Wherever he went, Muñiz was surrounded by the relatives of drug defendants desperate for effective legal assistance. If his clients had money, Ramsey hooked them up with a good attorney. But he frequently went to bat for indigent defendants as well, even when the cases he sponsored were sure to lose money for the law firms he represented. Attorneys shook their heads in bewilderment, but often yielded to Ramsey’s zealous advocacy.
Muñiz was in Dallas visiting with the families of marijuana defendants when he was arrested in March of 1994. When he went to trial a few months later, the attorneys he once worked for painted a composite portrait of a morally driven crusader; a man determined to weave some justice out of his own suffering.
In the eighteen years since he was arrested in the parking lot of a La Quinta motel in Dallas, Ramsey’s spiritual education has continued. His first teacher was Diego Duran, a sixteenth-century Spanish missionary whose writings preserved much of what we know of traditional Mexican religion. Connecting with the religious roots of the Mexico’s indigenous people strengthened his commitment to the Roman Catholic piety of his childhood.
Dr. Salvador Alvarez
In 2009, Ramsey experienced the first of many vivid night visitations from significant people from his past. These visions lack the disconnected and logically bizarre quality of normal dream. The conversation is natural, Ramsey says, “just like you were sitting across from me and we were talking. I can reach out and touch my visitors, and they can touch me. In every respect, it is just like real life. Most nights I have normal dreams or no dreams at all; but in the hours before a visitation, I can feel the Spirit growing inside me, and I know that tonight will be one of those nights.”
The most frequent night visitor is Ramsey’s father-in-law, Dr. Salvador Alvarez. “We were very close while he was still alive,” Ramsey told me, “we were tight.”
Ramsey’s nocturnal encounters, especially with Alvarez, have been life-transforming. “Ramsey, do you love?” his father-in-law asked one night. Confused, Ramsey said, “Yes, I love. Why do you ask?”
“When you speak of love,” Alvarez replied, “it is always for your own people, la raza. Nuestra gente. Have you no love for the rest of the world?”
“I realized he was right,” Ramsey says. “It isn’t enough to love your own people, it is also necessary to love people who are not like you. That’s why I now sign all my letters, ‘Freedom, justice, and love for all the world.”
Muñiz would be an excellent candidate for a presidential commutation if he would express remorse for his crimes and many wonder why he is so adamant on this point when, at first glance, the government’s case against him seems airtight.
Consider the facts the government presented to the jury in the summer of 1994:
On the evening of March 10th, 1994, agents with Drug Enforcement Administration in Dallas saw Muñiz pick up an unidentified man at the Love Field airport in Dallas, Texas.
The following morning, Muñiz had breakfast with an associate named Juan Gonzales and the unidentified man he met at the airport. In the course of conversation, the unidentified man referenced a deal scheduled for ten o’clock.
After breakfast, Muñiz and Gonzales dropped off the unidentified man at Love Field and returned to the Ramada Inn.
Muñiz got behind the wheel of a white Mercury Topaz and followed Gonzales to a La Quinta motel one mile south on Interstate 35.
When agents from the Dallas office of the Drug Enforcement Administration questioned Muñiz moments after he exited the Topaz, he concealed the keys and denied any association with the car.
The trunk was opened, revealing 40 kilograms of powder cocaine with a street value of $800,000.
That’s all the government wanted the jury to know about Ramsey Muñiz. It was then up to Dick DeGuerin, Ramsey’s high profile defense attorney, to muddy the waters as much as he could. A string of attorneys who had employed Ramsey as a legal assistant talked about his passion for helping indigent defendants. Testimony showed that Ramsey was in Dallas in March of 1994 because several families were desperate for his assistance.
As civil rights attorney Michelle Alexander recently told Stephen Colbert, “During the 1990s, the period of the greatest escalation in the drug war, nearly 80% of the increase in drug arrests were for marijuana possession, saddling these young people with criminal records for life that will authorize legal discrimination against them in employment, housing, access to education and public benefits.”
Ramsey Muñiz was in Dallas, testimony suggested, trying to minimize the impact of the government’s war on marijuana.
The jury also learned a little bit about the mystery man Muñiz picked up at the Dallas airport on Thursday night and deposited at the same airport Friday morning. Donacio Medina was a Mexican businessman who came to Texas seeking legal representation for two brothers, one in Texas, the other in California, who were awaiting trial on federal drug charges.
Testimony suggested that Donacio Medina was introduced to Ramsey Muñiz by Moises Andrade, a businessman who owned camera shops on both sides of the Texas-Mexico border. When Medina mentioned his brothers’ legal troubles, Andrade directed him to Ramsey Muñiz.
Medina wanted his brothers sentenced to as little time as possible and then, after they were sentenced, he was hoping to have them transferred to prisons in Mexico—a little-known feature of the recently adopted NAFTA agreement made this kind of prisoner swap possible. Well-connected and fully bilingual, Muñiz was the ideal person to help Medina negotiate with a high-profile Texas attorney.
Finally, defense counsel used motel phone logs to prove that virtually every call Ramsey made while in Dallas was either to his wife or a long list of prospective clients. The implication was that Muñiz came to North Texas on a legitimate business trip; doing a drug deal with a virtual stranger wasn’t on the agenda.
The jury also learned that Muñiz drove from Houston to Dallas in a red Toyota Camry driven by Juan Gonzales, a laborer from the Rio Grande Valley who frequently served as Ramsey’s chauffeur. Muñiz explained that he got more work done when he paid someone else to do the driving. Due to a medical emergency, Gonzales made a hurried dash to his home in South Texas and, for most of his time in the Dallas area, Muñiz was picked up and dropped off by potential clients.
Finally, the jury was told that the white Topaz Muñiz was driving just prior to his arrest had been rented in Houston by Donacio Medina using Juan Gonzales’ Sears credit card. Gonzales told Medina that he couldn’t use his card because his account for $300 in arrears, so Medina paid off the balance with cash so Gonzales could rent the car. This happened short days before Muñiz and Gonzales drove to Dallas.
Dick DeGuerin did some sleuthing while the trial was underway and the results were stunning. Prior to trial, the prosecution had portrayed the Muñiz prosecution as an in-house job. DEA agents in Dallas got a call from suspicious employees of the Ramada Inn, put Muñiz and Gonzales under surveillance, and the rest is history.
But when DeGuerin ran the official scenario past motel personnel he sparked a chorus of denials. No one associated with the Ramada Inn thought their courteous and professionally-dressed guests were the least bit suspicious, and no one had called the DEA office in Dallas. The government’s story was a complete fabrication.
There was more. Phone records showed that on March 9th, Donacio Medina called Ramsey Muñiz from the Classic Inn, a low-end motel in Fort Worth. This meant that Medina had travelled to Fort Worth prior to March 9, 1994, returned to Houston on March 9th, and flew back to Dallas the following day. This meant that Medina was in Houston on parts of March 9th, 10th and 11th (the day Muñiz was arrested).
The weird revelations kept coming. On the last day of trial, DeGuerin got a DEA agent to admit that Danny Hernandez, a criminal informant working with the DEA, had booked into Fort Worth’s Classic Inn on March 6th and maintained a room at the motel during all of Medina’s shuttle diplomacy between Houston and Dallas. The DEA agent insisted that Hernandez was working a completely different case. The agent insisted that Hernandez had no association with Medina and that no records suggested that Medina had ever stayed at the Classic Inn.
But if that was true, why did Medina call Muñiz from the Classic Inn on March 9th, and why, as trial testimony suggests, did Medina pay Danny Gallardo, an off duty FedEx driver, to transport him to the Classic Inn shortly after arriving at Love Field the following day?
Furthermore, why did the mysterious Danny Hernandez book into the Fort Worth motel claiming that he had no identification because his wallet had been stolen? If that was true, where did Hernandez get the money for the room, and why did he give the motel a fake address? Did Medina and Hernandez drive to Fort Worth in the white Topaz Medina rented with Juan Gonzales’ Sears card so that Medina could enjoy a base of operations without leaving a paper trail?
The final revelation arrived just as Dick DeGuerin was putting the finishing touches on his closing argument. Newly revealed government records showed that Donacio Medina had been “negotiating” with the DEA office in Houston. DeGuerin referenced this fact during his close, but with no time to think through all the implications, he didn’t know what to do with the information. It is likely that the prosecution revealed this information to the defense as soon as they learned about it. If so, both the prosecution and the defense went to trial knowing next to nothing about the man at the heart of the story.
What does this shocking piece of information imply?
First, it meant that the Muñiz operation originated in Houston and that DEA agents in Dallas joined the investigation late and only at the request of the Houston office.
Secondly, it means that, shortly after arriving in Houston from Mexico, Medina was arrested and “debriefed” by the DEA. What probable cause did the Houston DEA have for picking up Donacio Medina?
We can only speculate. Shortly after being convicted, Muñiz learned through the prison grapevine that an undercover DEA agent overheard Medina bragging about the size of his cocaine operation at a Houston party. Obviously, this theory can’t be documented.
It is also possible that Medina was picked up because two of his brothers were sitting in federal prisons awaiting trial on charges involving enormous amounts of powdered cocaine. One brother was found with almost $5 million in his possession. Two brothers facing narcotics charges suggested that Donacio had a stake in the family business.
Here’s what can be said for certain: Medina agreed to help the feds build a narcotics case against Ramsey Muñiz in exchange for free passage back to Mexico. Trial testimony shows that Medina was held at Love Field by DEA agents until 40 kilos of powdered cocaine were discovered in the trunk of the white Topaz. The moment the drugs were discovered, Medina was released.
Was the federal government targeting Ramsey Muñiz? This question cannot be answered with certainty. Ramsey’s name may have come up when the DEA asked Medina what he was doing in the country. If Medina claimed to be in Houston looking for legal representation for his brothers, Ramsey’s name would have dropped and a quick check would have revealed his prior narcotics conviction.
This would have suggested that, his cover story notwithstanding, Medina had entered the country to do a narcotics deal with an underworld figure named Ramsey Muñiz. It is possible that the DEA officials who targeted Muñiz knew nothing of his political history.
Confronted with the government’s suspicions, Medina faced a simple choice: deny that he and Muniz had a drug deal in the mix and join his brothers in a federal prison awaiting trial, or give the feds Muñiz in exchange for a one-way ticket to Mexico City.
It is possible, of course, that the Houston DEA got it right. The fact that Muñiz drove a narcotics-laden car down a one-mile stretch of I-35 is entirely consistent with the government’s theory. The prosecution had no burden to show who placed the drugs in the Topaz or who the prospective buyers might have been. Prior to trial, the government wasn’t even required to inform defense counsel of their relationship to Donacio Medina or any other criminal informant. In fact, the prosecution likely went to trial knowing very little (and caring even less) about Medina’s association to the Houston DEA.
With the striking exception of a single country, testimony from criminal informants is viewed with grave suspicion in the free world, and for obvious reasons. Alexandra Natapoff is America’s foremost authority on the use and abuse of “snitch” testimony.
“Criminal informants are an important piece of the wrongful conviction puzzle,” she says, “because informants have such predictable and powerful inducements to lie, because law enforcement relies heavily on their information, and because the system is not well designed to check that information.”
There are two enormous problems with the government’s case against Ramsey Muñiz (and virtually every other federal case built on snitch testimony). First, the government targeted Muñiz on the uncorroborated word of a man they believed to be a major narcotic importer. Second, by withholding this information, the government made it impossible for the sharpest defense attorney in Texas to challenge the government’s theory of the crime.
Did Ramsey Muñiz know he was transporting narcotics? That’s the only question that matters. The government shaped the evidence to make it appear that he did, while making it impossible for defense counsel to argue that he didn’t. In a nutshell, that’s what’s wrong with this case.
The government argued that Muñiz got behind the wheel of the white Topaz because it was his prearranged role in a narcotics conspiracy. That’s a nice simple story and, deprived of an alternative explanation, the jury was sure to buy it. But there are plenty of alternative explanations.
Consider this scenario. Confronted with DEA suspicions, Medina “confesses” that he came to Texas to do a drug deal with Ramsey Muñiz. Knowing that Juan Gonzales would soon be driving Muniz to Dallas, Medina rents a car for two days in Gonzales’ name and Gonzales goes along with the plan because it restores his credit and places $250 of free money in his pocket.
Next, the DEA gives Medina and Danny Hernandez 40 kilos of cocaine, the two men place the drugs in the trunk of the rented Mercury Topaz and drive to the Classic Inn in Fort Worth. Hernandez, rents a room without identification so there will be no record of Medina’s stay.
Medina flies back to Houston, at the request of the DEA (while Hernandez guards the stash), then Medina arranges to have Ramsey Muñiz pick him up at Love Field on the evening of March 10th so the Dallas DEA can witness the two men together.
The next step can be reconstructed from trial testimony. Medina approaches Danny Gallardo, an off-duty Fed Ex driver, and asks him to drive to the Classic Inn in Fort Worth on the evening of March 10th so Medina could pick up his car. After arriving at the motel, Medina tells Gallardo that the car isn’t there and asks to be driven to the Ramada Inn in Lewisville. Seeing Muñiz in the Ramada parking lot, Medina exits the car and Gallardo drives off.
Medina then gets into a car driven by an unidentified man and disappears until the following morning.
Trial testimony suggests that, on the morning of March 11th, Ramsey Muñiz, Donacio Medina and Juan Gonzales (recently returned from a whirlwind trip to the Rio Grande Valley) meet for breakfast at the Evans restaurant across the street from the motel. At some point, Medina slips Gonzales the keys to the rented white Topaz and asks him to return the vehicle for him.
The three men drive to Love Field shortly before 11:00 am the morning of March 11th, Medina gets out of the car and disappears inside the terminal. According to trial testimony, Gonzales stops en route to the Ramada Inn to call a relative from a pay phone. Only then does Gonzales inform Muñiz that he plans to spend the night at the La Quinta that evening, and asks his boss to help him move Medina’s rented car from the Ramada to the La Quinta. Although Ramsey doesn’t have a driver’s license, he agrees to make the one-mile trip as a favor to Gonzales.
Trial testimony suggests that Gonzales, learning that Muñiz intended to fly back to Houston after a noon meeting with prospective clients, decided to remain in the DFW area to look for work. The details remain sketchy, however, because Gonzales didn’t discuss his plans with Muñiz prior to arrest and because Gonzales didn’t testify at trial.
Was Ramsey Muñiz innocently moving a car for a friend, or was he engaged in an illegal narcotics deal? The answer depends on whether you believe Denacio Medina or Ramsey Muñiz.
This recreation of the story involves considerable speculation, but so does the government’s theory of the crime. Both reconstructions may be wildly off base. The real story may be buried somewhere in an obscure DEA file folder, but given the slim corpus of facts at our disposal, partisans on either side of the story are reduced to playing a guessing game.
Several questions may never be answered. Did Medina supply the drugs in the trunk of the Topaz or did the 40 kilos of cocaine come from a DEA evidence locker? Both theories are possible.
The more you know about this case the more troubling it becomes. Let’s begin with Donacio Medina. If DEA suspicions are justified (and I suspect they are) we are dealing with a man with an established narcotics distribution network trained and equipped to do his dirty business for him. Why would such a man travel to Texas to do a drug deal with Ramsey Muñiz when he could do this kind of transaction from the safety of his arm chair?
And if Medina came to Texas to do a narcotics transaction with Muñiz, why didn’t the deal go down in Houston or in the Rio Grande Valley where illegal narcotics are cheaper and more readily available? Why jump through all the logistical hoops a Dallas deal demanded? The most likely scenario is that Medina flew to Dallas because that’s where Muniz was doing business. But if Ramsey had a million dollar drug deal in the works, why was he spending so much time with piss ant marijuana defendants?
Here’s the simplest explanation: Medina planted the drugs in the Topaz and, working through Gonzales, placed Muñiz behind the wheel because that’s what his deal with the Houston DEA demanded.
Is an innocent and deeply spiritual man living behind bars because a Mexican drug lord was desperate to save his own skin? Of all the theories on the table, this one makes the most sense.
So why doesn’t the Department of Justice release Ramsey Muñiz because, innocent or not, he has paid his debt to society?
Two reasons. First, Ramsey’s innocence, however likely, cannot be proven. Since there is no parole in the federal legal system, the life sentence stands.
Second, the government can’t back away from the Muñiz fiasco without admitting that America’s war on drugs has thoroughly corrupted the federal justice system. Cases based on the uncorroborated testimony of drug dealers are guaranteed to convict the innocent along with the guilty. A morally flawed criminal with a gun to his head will say whatever the triggerman wants him to say.
Snitch testimony is inherently unreliable, that’s why the United States is the only nation in the free world that builds criminal cases on such a flimsy foundation. Unfortunately, America’s war on drugs cannot be waged without criminal informants.
Without the drug war, we are told, all hell would break loose. If a few thousand innocent Americans get locked up in the process, that’s just the price we have to pay. The Roman orator Cicero summed it up nicely a century before Jesus was crucified, “In time of war, the law falls silent.”
It is appropriate that Ramsey Muñiz identifies so closely with the suffering of Christ Crucified. Like his Savior, Ramsey has been sacrificed for the greater good. “You do not understand,” Caiaphas told the religious leaders of his day, “that it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed.”
This perverse but powerful logic keeps men like Ramsey Muñiz in bondage. If he would only admit guilt and feign contrition, Muñiz might have been released long ago. But like he says, “How do you express remorse for something you didn’t do?” If you are willing to abandon your last shred of self-respect, it’s easy. But men like Ramsey Muñiz can’t walk through that door.
There is only one way to resolve this dilemma. Barack Obama could issue a presidential commutation on humanitarian grounds. But the president can’t make this bold move unless we move first. Abraham Lincoln got it right, “With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed. Consequently he who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions. He makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed.”
What Franklin Roosevelt told a group of depression era reformers, Barack Obama says to us, “I agree with you, I want to do it . . . now make me do it.”
My old Church History Professor is getting radical in his old age. Bill was fresh out of Boston University when he came to Southern Seminary in Louisville in 1975. I was in his first class. A decade later, he was head of my PhD committee before leaving Southern for Samford University and then Wake Forest where he eventually became Dean of the Divinity School. For years, the urbane Baptist scholar has been drawn to Black Baptist churches, so maybe he’s been radical all along. AGB
In 1611, as they prepared to leave Amsterdam and return to England, members of the earliest Baptist congregation wrote a confession of faith, asserting that when members of the Body of Christ “come together” they “may and ought … to Pray, Prophecie, breake bread and administer in all the holy ordinances, although as yet they have no Officers, or that their Officers should be in Prison, sick or by any other means hindered from the Church.”
Those dissenters took it for granted that their “officers,” compelled by conscience, might ultimately end up in jail. Imprisonment was ensured for Thomas Helwys, the principal author of the 1611 confession, after the publication of his treatise, A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity, probably the first English text advocating complete religious liberty.
Arriving in England in 1612, Helwys was soon arrested and sent to Newgate Prison. Helwys scholar Richard Groves notes the possibility that a “handwritten document found in the Library of the House of Lords,” may have come from the Baptist leader. It states: “A most humble supplication of divers [various] poor prisoners and many others the king’s majesty’s loyal subjects ready to testify it by the oath of allegiance in all sincerity, whose grievances are lamentable, only for cause of conscience.”
Across the centuries dissent for “cause of conscience” has propelled innumerable Christians into “divers” prisons. It still does. (more…)
Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, has issued a thorough and sincere apology after referring to Black pastors like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson as “race hustlers” and implying that racial profiling is justified. Land also says he regrets plagiarizing a Washington Times columnist in the course of his tirade.
Lands comments were sparked by media coverage of the Trayvon Martin case in Florida.
After issuing a half-hearted and unconvincing apology in April, the Southern Baptist opinion leader sat down with a number of prominent Black pastors, including Arlington’s Dwight McKissic, pastor of Cornerstone Baptist Church. That meeting appears to have made a deep impression.
How do we explain this about-face? Is Land merely fighting to save his job or attempting to placate angry Black pastors?
I don’t think so. This apology sounds and smells like the real deal.
The real question is why the Baptist ethicist was so upset by the tidal wave of concern unleashed by the Trayvon Martin story, and that one’s a no-brainer. Land was living in the bubble of Southern white conservatism. Inside that segregated world of moral discourse, any reference to racism or racial profiling feels like an assault on the American way of life.
Land’s thinking was transformed by a close encounter with the world of Black evangelical moral discourse. Suddenly the issues were humanized and Land felt the pain his remarks had caused.
This is a testimony to the power of integrated moral conversation. We are a story-telling species. We don’t reason our way to a moral position; our ethical conclusions emerge from the value-laden stories we hear.
Richard Land’s Trayvon Martin rant shows how ugly things get when we are walled off from moral narratives shared by people who don’t look like us, sound like us, or live like us.
If you remain convinced that Land is just another Baptist bureaucrat fighting for his job, I urge you to read the full text of his apology:
“I am here today to offer my genuine and heartfelt apology for the harm my words of March 31, 2012, have caused to specific individuals, the cause of racial reconciliation, and the gospel of Jesus Christ. Through the ministry of The Reverend James Dixon, Jr. the president of the National African American Fellowship of the Southern Baptist Convention, and a group of brethren who met with me earlier this month, I have come to understand in sharper relief how damaging my words were.
“I admit that my comments were expressed in anger at what I thought was one injustice — the tragic death of Trayvon Martin — being followed by another injustice — the media trial of George Zimmerman, without appeal to due judicial process and vigilante justice promulgated by the New Black Panthers. Like my brothers in the Lord, I want true justice to prevail and must await the revelation of the facts of the case in a court of law. Nevertheless, I was guilty of making injudicious comments.
“First, I want to confess my insensitivity to the Trayvon Martin family for my imbalanced characterization of their son which was based on news reports, not personal knowledge. My heart truly goes out to a family whose lives have been turned upside down by the shocking death of a beloved child. I can only imagine their sense of loss and deeply regret any way in which my language may have contributed to their pain.
“Second, I am here to confess that I impugned the motives of President Obama and the reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. It was unchristian and unwise for me to have done so. God alone is the searcher of men’s hearts. I cannot know what motivated them in their comments in this case. I have sent personal letters of apology to each of them asking for them to forgive me. I continue to pray for them regularly, and for our president daily.
“Third, I do not believe that crime statistics should in any way justify viewing a person of another race as a threat. I own my earlier words about statistics; and I regret that they may suggest that racial profiling is justifiable. I have been an outspoken opponent of profiling and was grief-stricken to learn that comments I had made were taken as a defense of what I believe is both unchristian and unconstitutional. I share the dream of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., that all men, women, boys, and girls would be judged by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin. Racial profiling is a heinous injustice. I should have been more careful in my choice of words.
“Fourth, I must clarify another poor choice of words. I most assuredly do not believe American racism is a ‘myth’ in the sense that it is imaginary or fictitious. It is all too real and all too insidious. My reference to myth in this case was to a story used to push a political agenda. Because I believe racism is such a grievous sin, I stand firmly against its politicization. Racial justice is a non-partisan ideal and should be embraced by both sides of the political aisle.
“Finally, I want to express my deep gratitude to Reverend Dixon and the other men who met with me recently for their Christ-like witness, brotherly kindness, and undaunting courage. We are brethren who have been knit together by the love of Jesus Christ and the passion to reach the world with the message of that love. I pledge to them — and to all who are within the sound of my voice — that I will continue to my dying breath to seek racial justice and that I will work harder than ever to be self-disciplined in my speech. I am grateful to them for holding me accountable.
“I am also delighted to announce that as a result of our meeting, the ERLC, in conjunction with the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee, will initiate regular meetings to discuss our common calling to heal our nation’s racial brokenness, work for meaningful reconciliation, and strategize for racial justice.”
Did Dr. Land say everything I might have wanted him to say? No, he didn’t. But he said everything he could say without receiving a personality transplant. His strong repudiation of racial profiling warms the cockles of my Baptist heart.
Thanks to the Black Southern Baptist pastors who cared enough to speak the painful truth.
In 2010, the ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a federal class-action lawsuit against GEO Group when reports emerged of sexual abuse, improper medical care, extended prisoner isolation, and violence among inmates at the Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility located near Jackson, Mississippi. Earlier this year, a settlement in the case required the state of Mississippi to remove all youth from the Walnut Grove facility.
Unfortunately, the damage was already done.
One of the kids at the facility, Mike, suffered from severe brain damage from youth-on-youth violence incited by a prison guard. Dozens of other kids at the facility were also severely injured. Last fall, Friends of Justice had the opportunity to meet with Mike’s father, Michael McIntosh, during a trip to Mississippi. He told us the tragic story of his son’s experience at Walnut Grove. You can read more about Mike’s story in the article below. MWN
Michael McIntosh couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He had come to visit his son at the Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility near Jackson, Miss., only to be turned away. His son wasn’t there.
“I said, ‘Well, where is he?’ They said, ‘We don’t know.’”
Thus began a search for his son Mike that lasted more than six weeks. Desperate for answers, he repeatedly called the prison and the Mississippi Department of Corrections. “I was running out of options. Nobody would give me an answer, from the warden all the way to the commissioner.”
Finally, a nurse at the prison gave him a clue: Check the area hospitals. (more…)
By Alan Bean
By Alan Bean
In 1989, Carlos DeLuna was executed for the killing of a gas station attendant in Corpus Christi, TX. His conviction rested solely on eyewitness testimony. Over twenty years after his execution, the 
By Alan Bean
By Alan Bean
By Alan Bean
Friends of Justice 