The Treatment of Black Men & Boys in Court
Hi Friends,
Welcome to Issue 42 of this newsletter. This week, I was initially going to focus on the Kyle Rittenhouse trial, but really, what’s more important is understanding how shockingly different this white young man is being treated compared to Black men and boys, even when there is significantly less evidence of them committing a crime. Rittenhouse absolutely shot people with his gun, there’s no doubt there. But when Black men and boys are even accused of crimes with no or little evidence, the response is wildly different. Today, I’ll highlight two of the most heart wrenching modern cases, The Central Park Five and Kalief Browder. Let’s get into it.
Let’s Get Into It
The Central Park Five
Five Black and Latino teens were arrested in response to the murder and rape of a jogger named Trisha Meili in Central Park on April 20, 1989.
Antron McCray, 15, Kevin Richardson, 15, Yusef Salaam, 15, Raymond Santana, 14, and Korey Wise, 16 came to be known as The Central Park Five.
All of the boys were coerced into giving confessions on videotape without their parents present.
“When we were arrested, the police deprived us of food, drink or sleep for more than 24 hours,” Salaam wrote in the Washington Post in 2016. “Under duress, we falsely confessed. Though we were innocent, we spent our formative years in prison, branded as rapists.”
None of their supposed “confessions” were consistent, there were no eyewitnesses or DNA evidence, yet all 5 were convicted.
The teens were depicted in the media as “bloodthirsty,” “animals,” “savages” and “human mutations”.
The New York Post’s Pete Hamill wrote that the teens hailed “from a world of crack, welfare, guns, knives, indifference and ignorance…a land with no fathers…to smash, hurt, rob, stomp, rape. The enemies were rich. The enemies were white.”
Donald Trump took out full-page ads in The New York Times, the New York Daily News, the New York Post and New York Newsday with the headline, "Bring Back The Death Penalty. Bring Back Our Police!" He said ''They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes.''
In 2002, after serving sentences that ranged from six to 13 years for new DNA evidence and a confession proved convicted rapist Matias Reyes was the true, lone culprit.
The charges against the five men were vacated and they eventually received at $41 million settlement.
Kalief Browder
Kalief Browder, spent three years on Rikers Island without being convicted of a crime.
He was arrested in the Spring of 2010, at age 16, accused of robbing Roberto Bautista and stealing his backpack.
When the police responded to Bautista’s 911 call, Browder was searched and the backpack wasn’t found. Bautista’s recollection was also inconsistent.
The next day, Browder was charged with robbery, grand larceny, and assault. Because he was on probation, Browder was not released.
His bail was sat at $3,000, with $900 needed with a bail bondsmen. His family raised the money, but they were told that, since he was on probation from his prior felony conviction, (joyriding and crashing a car) his probation officer had placed a probation violation hold on him so posting bail would not get him released from jail anyway.
He spent more than one thousand days on Rikers waiting for a trial that never happened.
He was abused in prison, with one surveillance video showing an officer assaulting him and of a large group of inmates pummeling and kicking him.
He was offered a plea bargain of 3.5 years in prison if he pleaded guilty and another of 2.5 years if he plead guilty. Browder declined the offer.
Roberto Bautista eventually returned to Mexico and the DA realized they could not prove their case, but it is unknown exactly how long Kalief was still imprisoned.
On June 6, 2015, Kalief Browder committed suicide, tormented from his abuse and imprisonment.
Kyle Rittenhouse
I August 2020, Rittenhouse and his friend Dominick David Black "armed themselves with rifles" and drover about 15 miles to Kenosha to help defend a car dealership business from protestors who were protesting the shooting of an unarmed Black man by police, Jacob Blake.
In the hours leading up to the shooting, Rittenhouse appeared in multiple videos taken by protesters and bystanders and was interviewed twice: first by a livestreamer at the car dealership where he and a number of other armed men had stationed themselves, second by McGinniss. Rittenhouse was also seen talking with police officers.
Kyle Rittenhouse, 17, shot three men, killing two of them and wounding the third, during a protest against police brutality in Kenosha, Wisconsin. All of these attacks are well documented with cell phone camera footage.
Despite Rittenhouse crossing state lines into Wisconsin with a deadly weapon and damning video coverage and witness accounts that point to him as the aggressor, his defense maintains that he acted solely in self-defense.
Rittenhouse’s was generously characterized by the New York Times as someone “who has idolized law enforcement since he was young” and went to Kenosha “with at least one mission: to play the role of police officer and medic.” — Do you remember The Central Park Five being called “bloodthirsty,” “animals,” “savages” and “human mutations”?
Judge Bruce Schroeder decided last month that prosecutors may not refer to Rosenbaum, Huber, and Grosskreutz (the men who were shot and murdered) as “victims,” and that defense attorneys could call them “looters” or “arsonists.”
At the direction of Circuit Judge Bruce Schroder, Rittenhouse’s attorney placed slips of paper into a raffle drum with the numbers of each of the 18 jurors on it who sat through the two-week trial and Rittenhouse chose the papers. This has never been seen before, with a defendant drawing the names, and it’s incredible strange.
Trayvon Martin was accused of looking like a thug by the media in his hoodie, though he was just a Black child, murdered in the street. Tamir Rice was accused of appearing to have a weapon by the media, though he was just a Black child with a toy. The Central Park Five and Kalief Browder were truly innocent of their crimes, coerced and imprisoned anyway. Yet Kyle Rittenhouse, captured on video with a dangerous weapon, receives preferential treatment, support from police, and polite news coverage. This is the difference between how Black and white boys are treated in America.
