(This post is part of a series concerning Curtis Flowers, an innocent man convicted of a horrific crime that has divided a small Mississippi town.  Information on the Flowers case can be found here.)

Sheila Byrd of the Associated Press has written the first story on the sixth trial of Curtis Flowers to appear in the national media.   (Charlie Smith of the Greenwood Commonwealth has a story on Tuesday’s hearing in Winona that is also worthy of your attention.)

My views on the Flowers case are featured prominently in Byrd’s article, largely because attorneys on both sides have decided to withhold comment.  I have posted the text of Byrd’s article as it appears in the Biloxi-Gulfport Sun-Herald.

Flowers’ 6th trial in ’96 murders draws attention

By SHELIA BYRD – Associated Press Writer

A University of Michigan Study suggests that the college students of today are 40 percent less empathetic than students twenty or thirty years ago.  Sarah Konrath, one of the researchers involved in the study, blames technology: “The increase in exposure to media during this time period could be one factor,” she says.  “Compared to 30 years ago, the average American now is exposed to three times as much non-work-related information. In terms of media content, this generation of college students grew up with video games, and a growing body of research, including work done by my colleagues at Michigan, is establishing that exposure to violent media numbs people to the pain of others.”

Edward O’Brien, another researcher associated with the study, feels that social networking technology is part of the problem.  “The ease of having ‘friends’ online might make people more likely to just tune out when they don’t feel like responding to others’ problems, a behavior that could carry over offline. College students today may be so busy worrying about themselves and their own issues that they don’t have time to spend empathizing with others, or at least perceive such time to be limited.”

Could be.  But I am inclined to see the empathy gap as an indication that the Reagan Revolution has been far more successful than anyone imagined.  Since 1980, the dominant political message has branded empathy as futile, weak and counterproductive.  There is no sense trying to help people, we are told, it just makes them dependent and pathetic.  This being the case, the best strategy is to pursue naked self interest, leave the less fortunate to suffer the consequences of their laziness, and this will become the best of all possible worlds.

That message, praise God, wasn’t much of a factor when I was a kid.  Inspired by the non-violent direct action unleashed by the civil rights movement, thousands of young people, black and white, decended on the Southern states to work for integration and black voter registration.  Between 1961 and 1964, empathy reigned in America. 

The first wave of civil rights leaders were inspired by a vision they called “the beloved community.”  A 1974 article in the Christian Century argued that Martin Luther King was pushing for integration, not desegregation: 

Desegregation [King said] will only produce “a society where men are physically desegregated and spiritually segregated, where elbows are together and hearts apart. It gives us social togetherness and spiritual apartness. It leaves us with a stagnant equality of sameness rather than a constructive equality of oneness.” But integration will bring in an entirely different kind of society whose character is best summed up in the phrase “Black and White Together” — the title of one of the chapters of Why We Can’t Wait and the theme of one stanza of the civil rights movement’s hymn “We Shall Overcome.” Integration will enlarge “the concept of brotherhood to a vision of total interrelatedness.”

Who is holding up a vision of the beloved community in today’s America?  No one in the media spotlight, that’s for sure.  

When President Obama suggested that empathy was a desirable quality in a Supreme Court nominee he was roundly criticized.   Wendy Long, legal counsel to the Judicial Confirmation Network who once clerked for Clarence Thomas, spoke for many when she said that Obama “thinks judges should have empathy for certain litigants who come before them. Of course if you have empathy for everybody who comes before you, there are two sides to every case. If you have empathy for both sides then that’s the same as having no empathy at all. So what he means is he wants empathy for one side and what’s wrong with that is it is being partial instead of being impartial. A judge is supposed to have empathy for no one but simply to follow the law.”

Why is having empathy for both sides the same as having no empathy at all?  Universal empathy was the heart and soul of the beloved community King and others pursued.  The Wendy Long’s of this world believe that compassion begins and ends with the family and the clan.  In the early 1960s, America was still deciding if the enormous military and geographical reach fashioned out of World War II necessity would be dismanteled or sustained.  The decision to get serious in Vietnam was a resounding vote for imperial hegemony. 

Empathy and empire are antithetical.

You can see the new reality in the courtroom.  If the defendant is poor and black he is guilty.  No evidence is required.  To weigh the evidence fairly is itself an exercise in empathy and we have lost the capacity for that kind of thing.  Most Americans have lost the capacity to give a damn about marginalized people.  People of color who make it out of the hood rarely look back.  To enter Middle America, it seems, we must check our hearts at the door.

Can we rekindle the beloved-community-fire in our day?  Yes, but only if we set aside the coarse, unlovely assumptions of a cynical society.  We have lost far more than we realize.   Small, intentional counter cultures must be created virtually from scratch.

(This post is part of a series concerning Curtis Flowers, an innocent man convicted of a horrific crime that has divided a small Mississippi town.  Information on the Flowers case can be found here.)

A new report from the Equal Justice Initiative suggests that racial bias in the jury selection process is rampant, especially in Southern states.  No one who has spent much time in a courtroom, especially in small southern towns, will take issue with this finding.

Do prosecutors believe they are more likely to get a conviction from an all-white jury when the victim is white and the defendant is black?

Of course they do.  But it goes deeper than that.

You rarely see prosecutors trying to limit the number of white jurors when the defendant is white; so why is the mirror image of this phenomenon such a prominent feature of judicial life in America?

As the EJI study suggests, prosecutorial bias against black jurors is particularly marked when the defendant is African American and the death penalty is on the line.  African Americans, as a group, aren’t crazy about the death penalty, largely because it is used disproportionately against people of color.

In a groundbreaking study, Mark Pefley of the University of Kentucky and John Hurwitz of the University of Pittsburgh asked 600 white and 600 black participants if they supported the death penalty.  True to form, white support was around 65% while a slight majority of blacks stated their opposition.  The participants were then informed that some people oppose the death penalty because a disproportionate number of minorities are executed in America.  Following this simple statement, subjects were once again asked if they supported the death penalty.

Black support for the ultimate punishment dropped by twelve percentage points.  White support increased by twelve points.

This explains why Doug Evans, the man who will take Curtis Flowers to trial for an unprecedented sixth time next week, used all fifteen of his peremptory strikes on black residents back in 2004.  The Mississippi Supreme Court called it the most egregious case of racial bias they had ever seen . . . then handed the case back to Mr. Evans.  Under existing law, they had no choice.

The presence of a black defendant accused of raping or murdering a white victim naturally raises the issue of judicial fairness.  But instead of making white jurors more sensitive to the danger of racial bias, the fairness question (whether stated or merely implied) deepens racial animus in white jurors.

In the South, this heart-hardening effect is driven by civil rights resentment.  White Southerners have a well-publicized reputation for bigotry.  Remember the outcry when Neil Young (a Canadian smart-ass like me) released the song “Southern Man” in the late 1960s?: “I saw cotton and I saw black.  Tall white mansions and little shacks.  Southern Man when will you pay them back?  I heard screaming and bull whips cracking.  How long?  How long?”

Southern rockers Lynyrd Skynyrd scored an instant hit with “Sweet Home Alabama,” a song featuring the line: “I hope Neil Young will remember, a Southern Man don’t need him around anyhow.”  (Of course, the niftiest guitar hook in the history of popular music didn’t damage the song’s appeal.)  The spat wasn’t personal, but it emphasized the deep resentment any mention of the civil rights movement or Southern racism inspires in white folks.

Southern prosecutors aren’t necessarily racist, in the sense of hating black people; in some cases they are simply spinning a peculiar feature of American sociology to their advantage.  But what happens when a prosecutor is every bit as influenced by civil rights resentment as the white jurors he so cynically manipulates?

Take Doug Evans for example.  Before it became a social liability, Doug was a regular participant in meetings sponsored by a group of unapologetic white supremicists called the Council of Conservative Citizens.  Until the late 1990s, the CofCC was so representative of white mainstream opinion in Central Mississippi that involvement with the organization was a reputation-enhancer.

When you start with Mr. Evans’ historical affiliation with a racist organization, add the fact that the biggest backers of his quest for an all-white jury in the Flowers case are card carrying members of the CofCC, and throw in the prosecutor’s hard-earned reputation as Mississippi’s most racially biased district attorney, a clear, consistent (and, frankly, terrifying) picture emerges.

We should be grateful to the Council of Conservative Citizens for laying their opinions on the table.

The CofCC calls its magazine, The Citizens Informer, a title that hearkens back to the glory days when the Citizens’ Council movement controlled Mississippi politics and literal “informers” blanketed the Magnolia State.  The publication bills itself as “the voice of the no longer silent majority.”  Does the CofCC speak for the white mainstream in Mississippi?  If we’re talking about downtown Jackson and the ivy halls of Ole Miss, probably not.  If we’re talking about Winona, the jury (as they say) is still out.

Last week, the Citizens’ Informer published a nasty piece of work by Lawrence Auster, a leader of the paleo-conservative movement.   Auster was picking up on Rand Paul’s well-publicized difficulties with the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Auster doesn’t like the Civil Rights Act and isn’t inclined to tap-dance around the issue like candidate Paul.

Auster doesn’t have a problem with equality under the law or equal rights as abstract concepts.  But when you grant black folks equal rights, he says, there is an expectation of equal outcomes.  Because black people, in Auster’s view, are morally and intellectually inferior to whites, there is no way of bridging the performance gap unless you trash the great standards on which the nation was founded.

Thus, Lawrence Auster is death on the Civil Rights Act:

“By attacking, in principle, all racial discrimination, including private racial discrimination, it in effect delegitimized all natural and historical human groupings and cultures, if they were white. It delegitimized white people’s most basic rights of free association and of property, since such rights were now seen as having only one end in view: the oppression of blacks. And, as pointed out above, it said that whites’ entire history as the American majority was a scandal. The ongoing functional and economic deficiencies in the black community were seen as the result of the same historic white sin, which thus seemed to be still operative in the present as well as the past.”

You can see how this applies to the criminal justice system. “The liberal equality of individuals under the law is part of the essence of America,” Auster admits.  “But it must not be America’s primary value. Liberal values–the belief in free inquiry, the treatment of all citizens according to the same rules–have an indispensable place in our heritage. But liberalism, the ideology that makes the pursuit of equality the most important thing, spells the death of our heritage.”

And here’s where Auster’s views (which are a highly articulate version of CofCC common sense) touch on the jury selection process.  “The fact that the law is procedurally neutral and race-blind, doesn’t mean that the conditions that allow for such a system to exist are race blind,” Auster insists. “Change America into a brown and black country, and that new population will not only not have much regard for that impersonal, non-tribal system of justice, because they themselves are tribal, but they will seek to overthrow that system of justice, along with all other historical aspects of America, because they were made by whites whom the nonwhites are now replacing. From which it follows that to maintain its universalist and impersonal system of justice, America must remain a particularist, predominantly white country.”

In an article on his own website, Auster leaves nothing to the imagination.  “Blacks are more ‘non-objective,'” he explains. “They understand things in a much more personal, subjective way than whites. They seem to have much less interest in knowledge or beauty for its own sake . . . Blacks feel they should not be held to moral standards for the crimes of blacks against whites, because blacks have been the victims of this vast and still unacknowledged evil by whites for several thousands of years. Blacks thus tend to see every issue in purely racialist terms.”

Is this the way Doug Evans thinks?  If so, it explains a great deal.

Evans behaves as if black jurors can’t be trusted.  When all five black jurors in the fourth Curtis Flowers trial voted to acquit, Evans never asked himself if these folks might be seeing something he was missing.  Black jurors don’t believe the eye witnesses Doug Evans trots before the jury just because these people are all black.  If black jurors in Montgomery County were convinced by Doug Evans’ case they would vote to convict.  They don’t want to return a dangerous man to free society–you know whose neighorhood he would move into.

Does Doug Evans think like Lawrence Auster and the rest of the unapologetic white supremacists in the Council of Conservative Citizens?  There is plenty of evidence suggesting he does and not the slightest indication that he does not.

(This post is part of a series concerning Curtis Flowers, an innocent man convicted of a horrific crime that has divided a small Mississippi town.  Information on the Flowers case can be found here.)

A new study by the Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative deals with the problem of racial bias in jury selection.

Consider this:

According to an article in the New York Times, “EJI studied jury selection in eight states in the southern United States: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee. State appellate courts in each of these states – except Tennessee, whose appellate courts have never granted Batson relief in a criminal case – have been forced to recognize continuing problems with racially biased jury selection. The Mississippi Supreme Court concluded in 2007 that ‘racially profiling jurors and racially motivated jury selection [are] still prevalent twenty years after Batson was handed down.'”

That quote came from the Mississippi Supreme Court’s 2007 finding that the third trial of Curtis Flowers was riddled with racial bias.  It is hardly surprising that a New York Times story highlighting the EJI’s new study begins and ends with the Flowers case.  The caption under the picture above reads, “Curtis Flowers at his capital trial in 2004. The Mississippi Supreme Court reversed his first conviction after prosecutors used all of their peremptory strikes against blacks in the jury pool.”

Actually, it was his third conviction, but who’s counting.

The NYT article concludes with this:

In one Mississippi case, a black man, Curtis Flowers, was sentenced to death in 2004 for killing four furniture store employees. The jury was made up of 11 whites and one black after prosecutors used all 15 of their peremptory strikes on black jurors. Montgomery County, where the crime occurred, is 45 percent black. The Mississippi Supreme Court reversed the case, noting that “racially motivated jury selection is still prevalent 20 years after Batson.”

Although it didn’t make the New York Times, the Mississippi court introduced the meaty portion of its ruling with an expression of amazement: “The instant case presents us with as strong a prima facie case of racial discrimination as we have ever seen in the context of a Batson challenge.”

Batson vs. Kentucky, you may recall, was the 1986 Supreme Court Decision banning the use of racial criteria in jury selection.  Unfortunately, so long as a prosecutor can give a race-neutral reason for making a strike (it doesn’t have to make sense) it is virtually impossible to sustain a Batson challenge.  Tennessee, for example, has never reversed a case because of racial bias in the jury selection process.

The Recommendations section of the EJI report is refreshingly candid.  Here are a few highlights, followed (in italics) with an application to the case of Curtis Flowers.

• “Dedicated and thorough enforcement of anti-discrimination laws designed to prevent racially biased jury selection must be undertaken by courts, judges, and lawyers involved in criminal and civil trials, especially in serious criminal cases and capital cases.”  Racial bias is particularly problematic in high-profile capital cases, especially when the state’s case is highly circumstantial.  Black jurors evaluating a case involving a black defendant are far more likely than white jurors to hold the State to its proper burden. 

 

• “Prosecutors who are found to have engaged in racially biased jury selection should be held accountable and should be disqualified from participation in the retrial of any person wrongly convicted as a result of discriminatory jury selection. Prosecutors who repeatedly exclude people of color from jury service should be subject to fines, penalties, suspension, and other consequences to deter this practice.”  When the Mississippi Supreme Court characterized DA Doug Evans’ behavior as the most egregious example of racial bias in the jury selection process they had ever witnessed there were no negative consequences.  Evans stayed on as prosecutor for trials four, five and (beginning next week) six.

 

• “States should provide remedies to people called for jury service who are illegally excluded on the basis of race, particularly jurors who are wrongly denigrated by state officials. States should implement strategies to disincentivize discriminatory conduct by state prosecutors and judges, who should enforce rather than violate anti-discrimination laws.”  The only disincentive in the Flowers case is to recuse both DA Doug Evans and Judge Joey Loper from the case.  The prosecution must be taken over by the Attorney General’s Office and a judge from outside the jurisdiction should be appointed.

 

• “Community groups, civil and human rights organizations, and concerned citizens should attend court proceedings and monitor the conduct of local officials with regard to jury selection practices in an effort to eliminate racially biased jury selection.”  Four members of the Friends of Justice board and supporters from across the nation have committed to being in Winona.  We will be paying close attention to the voir dire process and publishing our observations on this blog.

 

• “State and local justice systems should provide support and assistance to ensure that low-income residents, sole caregivers for children or other dependents, and others who are frequently excluded from jury service because of their economic, employment, or family status have an opportunity to serve.”  Most middle class people are compensated by their employers for jury service, but self-employed and minimum wage workers with no benefits are forced to shoulder the economic burden themselves.  As a result, minorities are far more likely to excuse themselves from the venire due to hardship.  This was one of the factors that allowed Doug Evans to seat eleven white jurors in a county that is 45% black. 

 

• “Greater racial diversity must be achieved within the judiciary, district attorney’s offices, the defense bar, and law enforcement to promote and strengthen the commitment to ensuring that all citizens have equal opportunities for jury service.”  The EJI study shows that only 4% of Mississippi district attorneys are black.  Winona’s black chief of police should have been responsible for investigating the Flowers case in 1996 but was pushed aside by the DA’s investigator John Johnson.  As a result, the same person was investigating and prosecuting the same case–a  recipe for prosecutorial tunnel vision.

This PDF version of the Curtis Flowers PowerPoint is the most effective summary of this disturbing case we have produced to date.  Please check it out and share promiscuously.

This post is from founding Friends of Justice board member, Charles Kiker.

A couple of weeks or so ago, Alan Bean posted on the Friends of Justice website a blog which he called “A New Kind of Christianity.” There’s something about the title which doesn’t quite set well with me.

I’m not sure what it is. I’m not a purist who thinks there can be only one kind of Christianity. I know that Christianity has evolved over the centuries into different forms. Even the early church was not in total agreement. And there evolved Augustinian-Constantinian Christianity, Catholicism of the Eastern and Western varieties, Reformation Christianity in all its multicolored hues, the Radical Reformation in its various forms, the rise of Christendom, Modernism, Liberalism, Fundamentalism, Evangelicalism, post-modernism ad infinitum, ad nauseum.

Maybe what I was feeling is that we don’t need just another leaf to tack on to the many branches of the Christian tree. (It should be added that Dr. Bean is not proposing a new movement in competition with the current world of Christianity.)

Christianity, in all or almost all its forms, is too much identified with Christendom, and we don’t need a new kind of Christendom.

Well then, what do we need? I think we need a new commitment to becoming and being followers of the Way. To do this we will have to read afresh the synoptic gospels and take seriously the teachings of Jesus, to become red letter Christians, as Tony Campolo puts it.

What are some of the ramifications of a movement of this kind? What will happen if we become more serious followers of the Way?

What will not happen if this movement becomes a movement, is that it will not provide a formula for building big churches. As Alan Bean correctly observes, “. . . you can’t build a megachurch or a popular movement on this kind of religious foundation.” I’m not sure you can even build a small church on this kind of foundation. I know you could not in small town places like my hometown of Tulia, Texas. I think it would be difficult even in large metropolitan areas like Dallas.  Even if we could build such a church, I’m not sure we should. I fear the tendency would be to talk to each other, and maybe pat each other on the back about how we have a better understanding of the gospel than those poor benighted souls in the established churches.

Perhaps it will be better if we can provide a prophetic presence in established congregations in the established Church. But neither is that easy. There can be a strong social opprobrium approaching shunning against those who have a radically different understanding of what church is all about.

Radical followers of the Way will have a kind of innate Anabapist/Radical Reformation suspicion of  the governments of this world “from the court house to the White House” in American parlance. A church that aligns itself with political movements or governmental institutions is a church that will have grave difficulty in having a prophetic witness to those movements or institutions. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was aghast at seeing the American flag in American churches. I am somewhat troubled to recite the pledge of allegiance at civic events, and am aghast to find it in the order of worship on patriotic weekends.

I humbly suggest that what can happen is that we can become what Jim Wallis calls approvingly and Glenn Beck and his ilk call disparagingly “social justice” Christians.  

As social justice followers of the Way we will have a strong emphasis on the kingdom of God rather than an almost exclusive emphasis on going to heaven when you die. I have not done a concordance word count, but people who have indicate that the kingdom was the topic Jesus talked about most often. He taught us to pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth, as it is in heaven. (Italics mine.)

When Jesus died on a Roman cross instead of ushering in the kingdom, it provoked a crisis among followers of the Way. Was the kingdom just wishful thinking, or is it delayed until some end time? This crisis is reflected in the New Testament. When Jesus speaks of the kingdom in Matthew, the language is almost always “the kingdom of heaven,” rather than “the kingdom of God.” Many scholars believe this is due to the Jewishness of the Gospel of Matthew and its reluctance to speak directly of God. Might it also be a move toward transporting the kingdom to some ethereal realm? Mark and Luke do not share the Matthean reluctance to have Jesus speaking of the kingdom of God. John, writing near the end of the first Christian century, has almost totally spiritualized the gospel. But in the rare instances John’s Jesus speaks of the kingdom, it is the kingdom of God.

The Apostle Paul expected the imminent return of Christ to inaugurate the kingdom. And of course there is the Book of Revelation, with its apocalyptic encouragement of the coming victory of Jesus for those suffering under the Roman Empire.

But Jesus didn’t come, and after almost two thousand years the kingdoms of this world still oppress “the least of these.”

So, if we are to be radically concerned about what happens to “the least of these” in this world how can we be radically committed to a kingdom of God which is long delayed in coming? Unless the kingdom has come among us, as Jesus said.

Once Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming and he answered, “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For in fact, the kingdom of God is among you. (Luke  17:20-21, NRSV)

Maybe that’s the kind of Jesus movement we can become, one which can not be definitively pointed out as the essence of the kingdom, but which nevertheless is or at least contains the essence of the kingdom, with its essence as a prophetic witness within Christianity, even within or among the kingdoms of this world.

Alan Bean says in his blog, “Religious people, white Christians in particular, must come to the grips with the spiritual wickedness in the criminal justice system.  Can we stand up for the victims of wrongful prosecution?”

While I would not view this movement of followers of  the Way as being focused exclusively on “spiritual wickedness in the criminal justice system,” certainly we must have our eyes, ears, and hearts attuned to the sights, sounds, and vibrations of injustice wherever it occurs, including injustice in the criminal justice system.

Charles Kiker,

Tulia, Texas 

 

Please check out Mark Osler’s recent contribution to the Huffington Post, Jesus Christ, Capital Defendant.

You will also want to check out the tone deaf comments that follow Mark’s excellent piece.  They help explain my longing for a new kind of Christianity.

We are proud to have Professor Osler on the Friends of Justice board.

 

People often ask me what distinguishes Friends of Justice from other advocacy groups.  In lieu of an answer, let me tell you a story.

Five women have been raped by a black man in a mid-sized college town.  An alarmed community is crying out for justice.  Investigators have been working on the case for months but still have no suspect.  So they get creative. 

An attractive young woman in revealing clothes enters a popular college pizza joint.  Patrons have no way of knowing she is a police officer.  A few moments later, the woman leaves the restaurant.  A young black male follows her out the door.  He walks to her car.  He offers to drive her home.  He asks for her phone number.  He offers to take her to a bar and buy her a drink.

Back at the station, the police officer gets the name of the man who followed her out of the restaurant and does a background check.  It happens to be the same guy she arrested a few months earlier for possessing marijuana and carrying an illegal weapon. 

Officers take a Polaroid picture to the most recent victim.  “That’s him,” she says. 

Shortly thereafter, the victim picks the suspect out of a police line up.

Convinced they have their man, police make an arrest and move toward trial. 

No physical evidence ties the suspect to the crime and several witnesses are ready to testify that they were with him at the time of the rape.  A classic he-said-she-said stand-off.  Who are you going to believe, the woman who was raped or friends eager to bolster their buddy’s alibi?

A trial date is set.

Now, suppose you are the man charged with rape.  The prosecutor offers you a sweetheart deal in exchange for a confession.  You won’t take the deal.  You aren’t going to confess to a crime you didn’t do.  The DA shrugs and tells you to have it your way.

Who ya gonna call?

The ACLU?  The NAACP?  The nearest Innocence Project?  Amnesty International?  The Southern Poverty Law Center?  The Center for Constitutional Rights? 

You have never heard of most of these outfits and it wouldn’t matter if you had;  None of these organizations has a strategy for pre-conviction intervention in criminal cases.  They do some wonderful things, but pre-trial intervention isn’t one of them.  The need is there, certainly, but, apart from securing qualified legal counsel, no one has a strategy that addresses cases like this. 

You’ve already got a defense attorney and he’s doing everything he can.  But ethics rules make it hard for defense counsel to get their side of the story to the media.  The attorney tries to get additional facts into the courtroom, but the judge slams the door.

 The case goes to trial.  Nobody learns that the state had identified another suspect.  Nobody learns that four additional rape victims couldn’t pick the defendant out of  a line-up.  It never comes to light that the case involving the dope and the gun occurred after the defendant had been robbed.  When he called the police, they weren’t interested in his story, but he looked suspicious so they decided to conduct a search.

The jury never hears that several police officers, aware of these facts, were beginning to question the state’s handling of the case.  The defense attorney has spoken to some of these officers, but the judge won’t let them testify.

The jury and the media hear only one story.  The rape victim says the suspect raped her.  It feels so good to put a rapist behind bars.  It feels so bad to contemplate letting a guy who can’t prove his innocence walk free over a technicality like reasonable doubt.

The all-white jury deliberates for six hours and comes back with a unanimous verdict.  Guilty as charged.

In retrospect, an air of inevitability hung over the case.  You take a heinous crime, a sympathetic white victim, a black guy who has already been charged with two felonies, unswerving eye-witness testimony, an all-white jury and a law-n-order town and you will get a conviction every time.

But is the guy guilty? 

With evidence this ambiguous, how can you be sure?

It’s simple, really.  Twelve jurors heard all the evidence and reached a unanimous verdict.  That’s how you know he’s guilty.

The defendant in this case has a name: Timothy Brian Cole. 

Ten years after conviction, the real rapist (the man the police were considering until they pulled their surveillance trick in the Pizza Joint) wrote a letter of confession.  He had waited patiently for the statute of limitations to expire, then he made his move. 

A judge refused to hold a hearing.

Four years later, Timothy Cole died; his asthma aggravated by stress and prison condictions.

In 2001, the actual rapist, a man named Jerry Wayne Johnson, was released from prison.  He made a second attempt to confess.

Same result.

Finally, in 2007, Johnson’s third confession, combined with a request to re-test the rape kit, was presented to a Lubbock Judge.

Same result.

This appeal was made to an Austin judge who granted a hearing at the conclusion of which Timothy Cole was fully exonerated . . . eight years after his death.

Michelle Mallin, the woman whose confident testimony put Tim Cole behind bars got the news from investigator George White.

“You shouldn’t feel bad about this, Michele,” White told her.  “[Cole] put himself in that lineup . . . It’s OK.  He had asthma.  He was going to die anyway.”

In the great city of Lubbock, a confession from the actual rapist and  irrefutable DNA evidence wasn’t enough to prompt a re-evaluation of Tim Cole’s case.  How would Tim have faired if, like 90% of defendants charged with violent crimes, there was no DNA evidence to examine?  He would still be known, if he was known at all, as the woman who raped Michelle Mallin in 1985.

If possible, Friends of Justice intervenes prior to final conviction.  We tell the story defense counsel is usually prohibited from telling.  We get the background information courtroom reporters rarely find.  We review the case from every angle imaginable: history, sociology, even theology come into the process.  We aren’t bound by the rules impinging on officers of the court. 

We are loose canons, but we are never reckless. 

When legal professionals cannot or will not or will not tell the truth, Friends of Justice fills the gap.

Is Rand Paul a racist?  And what about Rand’s father, former presidential candidate Ron Paul?  Does civil rights resentment run in the family?

Rand Paul attracted media attention when he told Rachel Maddow that he rejected key provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Maddow: “Do you think that a private business has the right to say we don’t serve black people?” 

Rand Paul: “Yes:

Rand Paul, the Tea Party victor of Tuesday’s Republican primary in Kentucky, is beginning to backtrack.

After listening to Rand Paul for thirty seconds you realize that the son got all of his father’s ideas, but only a modicum of the old man’s intelligence.

I doubt either man is a racist in the sense of hating individual black people for the color of their skin.  But Ron Paul grew up in a world saturated with neo-Confederate clap-trap and deep racial resentment.

Two years ago, James Kirchick with the New Republic wrote an article called, “Angry White Man: The Bigoted Past of Ron Paul.”  The article created a brief Tea Pot Tempest before passing into oblivion.  Kirchick tracked down some of Mr. Paul’s old newsletters dating back to the mid-1970s and was shocked by the content.  Paul (or his surrogates) regularly made crudely disparaging remarks about Martin Luther King, the civil rights movement, homosexuals, Jews, Israel and AIDS victims while describing low-income African Americans as lazy, welfare dependent criminals.  Moreover, Paul appeared to embrace a full range of One World conspiracy theories.

Asked to explain the newsletters on Wolf Blitzer’s CNN program, candidate Paul expressed shock and bewilderment.  He hadn’t written the offensive newsletters, he said, and didn’t know who did.  He was doing a lot of traveling and public speaking at the time, Paul explained, and had a medical practice to look after.  As a result, he farmed the newsletter out the underlings and didn’t give it a lot of attention.

That was enough to satisfy Mr. Blitzer.

More troubling, however, is the comments section.  Ron Paul devotees defended their leader against Kirchick’s “smear campaign” but seemed untroubled by the content of the old newsletters.  This is typical:

While many of the statements are politically incorrect. Are they exactly errant? To me it seems like messages of frustration for a government that literally has kept blacks down by welfare and other means to get their votes. As for Israel, I know RP says he would also not give money to their enemy. Does it make sense to fund Israel and then fund their enemies even more? As for Alex jones and the central bankers, bilderburg, etc. If people don’t see that has been happening since about 1913 then they are the loons! This is not conspiracy but fact. As for racism! I don’t think there is a race that doesn’t have bad people, lazy people, corrupt people, etc. which I believe was also in one of those newletters but wasn’t mentioned here! Can’t wait to see what you write when the One World System is in place…and it will be! We are so far along in globalization it would make your head spin and somehow you spent too much time writing this article instead of researching the latter.

The most common reaction boiled down to: “So, what’s the big deal?  Every right-thinking American believes that stuff.”

I am profoundly unconvinced by Ron Paul’s exercise in spin control.  Kirchick asked all the right questions at the conclusion of his article:

Paul’s campaign wants to depict its candidate as a naïve, absentee overseer, with minimal knowledge of what his underlings were doing on his behalf. This portrayal might be more believable if extremist views had cropped up in the newsletters only sporadically–or if the newsletters had just been published for a short time. But it is difficult to imagine how Paul could allow material consistently saturated in racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and conspiracy-mongering to be printed under his name for so long if he did not share these views. In that respect, whether or not Paul personally wrote the most offensive passages is almost beside the point. If he disagreed with what was being written under his name, you would think that at some point–over the course of decades–he would have done something about it.

Even if the real Ron Paul is a big fan of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, his association with groups like the John Birch Society and proponents of Christian Reconstructionism raise troubling questions.  In a 2008 address at a John Birch Society convention, Paul praised the organization and thanked its supporters for working supporting him over the years. 

The John Birch Society was, and remains, deeply opposed to the goals and successes of the civil rights movement.

Christian Reconstructionism is a philosophy rooted in the writings of Rousas John Rushdoony, a pseudo-scholar who denied the holocaust and saw slavery as fully legitimate.  According to Rushdoony’s Wikipedia article: “Rushdoony believed that interracial marriage, which he referred to as ‘unequal yoking’, should be made illegal. He also opposed ‘enforced integration’, referred to Southern slavery as ‘benevolent’, and said that ‘some people are by nature slaves’.”

Gary North, Rushdoony’s son-in-law (and ardent Reconstuctionist), worked for Ron Paul when he first went to Washington in 1976.  Ron Paul’s racial views may have evolved over the past few decades, but this stuff is in his DNA.

I like Ron Paul.  On a few subjects (the drug war, the Iraq war) I find his arguments compelling.  I met him when I was giving a talk at a libertarian convention in College Station, Texas a few years ago and he seemed like a genuine guy.   But he isn’t the kind of secular libertarian you will find at Reason Magazine or the Cato Institute. 

I predict that neither Rand Paul nor his illustrious father will be damaged by charges of closet bigotry.   This supposedly negative press will help both men more than it will hurt them.  It is virtually impossible for an outspoken supporter of civil rights to succeed in conservative politics.  The bigots may be in the minority, but they comprise a powerful constituency that no savvy Republican can ignore. 

How widespread is civil rights resentment in white America?  Here’s one way to find out: ask a representative sample of Americans if they share Rand Paul’s concerns about the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

I predict that a majority of white respondents would answer in the affirmative.   I pray I’m wrong about that.