Reset Password
Reset Link Sent
| Blogs > Adolpho > My Blog |
|
The innocence project On Thursday June 23, Baltimore police officer Caesar Goodson was acquitted of all charges in the death of Freddie Gray, the young man who died in April 2015 after suffering a severe spinal injury while in police custody. Gray’s death was the spark to more than two weeks of civil unrest, but the judge in Goodson’s trial said that the state had failed to meet the burden of proof necessary to show that Goodson meant to harm Gray. Goodson was the third officer to stand trial and be found not responsible for Gray’s death (three more trials are scheduled for later this year). Thus far, nobody is responsible for Gray’s death. Also on June 23, a Texas grand jury declined to indict a former McKinney police officer on charges stemming from an incident at a pool party in June 2015. Eric Casebolt was one of several officers who responded to a call reporting a fight at an apartment complex. Video of the incident went viral showing Casebolt, who resigned four days later, yelling at and demanding that some black teenagers sit on the grass and not move, and that others leave the area. No such demands were made of the other youth gathered at the scene who represented different ethnicities. At one point, Casebolt pulled out his revolver near a group of young males, even though another officer near Casebolt saw no such need for the display of a firearm. The largest amount of criticism stemmed from Casebolt’s decision to violently subdue a bikini-clad 14-year-old black girl, throwing her to the ground and placing his knee in her back. The Collin County grand jury decided that there wasn't enough evidence to bring criminal charges against Casebolt. In other words, nobody did anything wrong in the video, And Monday, June 20, the United States Justice Department concluded its investigation into the 2013 death of Kendrick Johnson in Georgia, saying there is not enough evidence to charge anyone. Four months after Johnson's body was found in a gym mat, the Georgia state medical examiner concluded he had died as the result of accidental "positional asphyxia," implying Johnson had suffocated as a result of being trapped upside-down in the rolled-up mat. The 's parents never believed the local authorities’ explanation that the 17-year-old got stuck in the mat after diving in to retrieve a shoe. [Emphasis mine] His parents, Kenneth and Jacquelyn Johnson, later had his body exhumed and hired an independent pathologist to performed a second autopsy on Johnson's body. In the second autopsy, two months later, a medical examiner concluded Johnson's death was a result of a homicide. Evidence of "blunt force trauma to the right side of Kendrick's neck, near the jaw, and the manner of death was not an accident," the Justice Department statement details. "He found hemorrhages to the jaw line area not detected during the GBI autopsy." Johnson’s parents named several individuals they thought were the prime suspects in their ’s death, but the Justice Department ruled that out, stating there was “insufficient evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that someone or some group of people willfully violated Kendrick Johnson’s civil rights or committed any other prosecutable federal crime.” Nobody killed Kendrick Johnson. Nobody ever seems to harm or kill black people in this country except other black people and yet, communities and some media outlets (never enough) are filled with stories of harm by other people … nobodies. The words of Baltimore attorney Warren Brown, who observed Caesar Goodson’s trial, pretty much sum up the thoughts of a lot of folks: “The state's case [against Goodson for Gray’s death] amounted to ‘this was a tragedy and so therefore someone should be held responsible, but that's just not the way it works.’” Obviously, that’s not how any of this works. But it should be. |
|||
6/29/2016 6:56 am |
It does seem strange that so many black people have been beaten, roughed up and even murdered by the police and usually no-one even gets charged, and even if someone does get charged they're all found not guilty anyway. If any of the incidents you listed had happened to a white person the outcome would probably have been a lot different. The list of young black people this has happened to is getting longer by the minute. It's heartbreaking that any of this could happen.
|
×
×