...and justice for all

I've been thinking a lot about fairness lately.

Fairness is an everyday topic of discussion in a classroom -- no less so in 12th grade than in 2nd. Almost all of my students are legal adults, but the silence of a testing room is still punctuated with cries of "How come he got the laminated periodic table and I just got this paper one?"

It's easy to say that they're acting like third graders. They often are. But the call for justice in my classroom is a mere microcosm of the injustices outside.

I came back from spring break to the news that one of my students spent most of his break sitting in jail with bail set at $40,000. I didn't believe him at first when he told me how high his bail was, but he produced a crumbled bail bonds receipt from his back pocket as evidence.

"This looks incredibly serious.What happened?"
"Bro, I got in the wrong car, bro."
"How do you get two felonies for getting into the wrong car?"

He had to run to class, but I wheedled the story out of him, piece by piece, over the course of the day.

The Friday night of spring break, he and a few other students were bored. He called a friend up and his friend agreed to drive them both to Oakland to find something to do. His friend pulled up and my student jumped in the car. On their way home from Oakland, they noticed a police car following them. Both cars slowed to a halt in front of my student's house, and my student's mother came out to meet them. At that moment, an officer emerged from the police car and pulled my student and his friend out of the car. My student's mother was yelling from the porch of their house for her son to run, but he knew better.

Both boys sat on the curb in handcuffs as the officer searched the car.
"Do you know why I am searching your car?" The officer asked.
"No, I don't," my student replied. His friend looked at the ground.
The officer walked back to the car and called for backup. Three police cars lit up 15th street as five officers searched the car.

Suddenly, the commotion stopped. There were flashlights and radio calls. An officer came up to my student and informed him, amid his mother's screams, that he was being taken into custody. My student was put in the back of a police car and taken to the station.

It wasn't until he was at the station that an officer told him his charges: two counts felony possession of stolen firearms, one count felony possession of loaded firearm. My student looked on stony faced as his charges were read to him.

"You have the right to remain silent... you know your rights, right?"
"Yes. I know my rights."

He should. He got 100% on his Bill of Rights exam in government class.

He spent a few nights in jail until his mother was able to bail him out with the help of a bail bond agency.

When my student was explaining the story to me, he exuded tranquility in ways only made possible if one had grown up on a street that was more frequently lit with the lights of police cars than the light of streetlamps.

"So what do you mean when you say you got into the wrong car?"
"They wasn't my guns. I know I do bad stuff sometimes, but I'm a lot more careful than that. It was my friend's car, the guns were under his seat, and I didn't hear about them until I was sitting in the police station."
"Why are you being charged then? Didn't your friend own up?"
I knew the answer to that before the question was even out of my mouth.
"Nah, brah, and I ain't gonna tell neither."

Suddenly, it became clear to me why the jaywalkers in Richmond were so painfully slow. It became clear to me why I would hear the screeching of tires doing donuts on a wet street at midnight.

My student was calm because he had anticipated spending time in jail before he was twenty. He honestly seemed shocked that it hadn't happened before. My student and many others like him have a philosophy of fatalism that is rivaled by many career soldiers. He had witnessed so many family and friends killed, filed away in a state penitentiary, put in a coma, overdosing on drugs, and disappearing. He had not witnessed anyone he knows hitting thirty without derailing his or her life permanently. He was just waiting for it to happen to him.

His court date is June 4th, about a week before he graduates from high school.   Hopefully everything will turn out alright. If it doesn't, at least in jail he'll be safe from everything on the outside.

What does it say about our society that an innocent teenager might go to jail for a long time for a crime he didn't commit? What does it say about our society that, if he were white or affluent, he would have a statistically lower chance of being convicted, or even being arrested in the first place? What does it say about us that his entire future, this kid's entire destiny, is being placed in the hands of one public defender?

I hope the public defender is competent. Anecdotal evidence tells me this is unlikely.

It's stunning to me that kids like this can be incredibly intelligent, be fortunate enough to attend a college-preparatory charter school, reap the maximum benefit from programs like Teach for America, and still spend the rest of his life in jail.

One might wonder why he got into a car with someone who probably had guns under the car seat. Unfortunately, there aren't many people his age in Richmond who don't have guns under the car seat.
Ask anyone in the city why they have this bellicose accessory and they'll reply, "because if I didn't have guns under my car seat, how would I shoot back at people who are shooting at me?"

Like I said, I've been thinking a lot about fairness lately.