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Time for an Awakening with Genealogist Antoinette Harrell
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Activist, Researcher and Genealogist, Antoinette Harrell joined us in conversation. Ms. Harrell discussed teaching others how to research their African American Genealogy; along with her other important work of over 20 years that has unearthed thousands of state and federal documents relating to peonage that resulted in the Antoinette Harrell Collection.
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Black people more likely to be wrongfully convicted
All Marvin Anderson ever wanted to be was a firefighter. Instead, at 18 years old, he was wrongfully convicted of rape, sodomy, abduction and robbery.
When a Virginia judge sentenced him to 210 years in prison, “My whole body went numb,” Anderson told CNN. “I knew I was going to prison for something I didn’t do.”It took 15 years behind bars and five years on parole before Anderson was exonerated for his crimes — the result of DNA testing.“I trusted in the justice system and it failed me,” he said.Anderson is just one of hundreds of black men who have been convicted of and exonerated for crimes they didn’t commit. A new report from the National Registry of Exonerations, a joint project between the University of California, Irvine; University of Michigan Law School and Michigan State University College of Law, shows that black people are more likely to be wrongfully convicted than white people and are also likely to spend longer in prison before being exonerated for their crimes.
While black people represent 13% of the US population, they represent a whopping 47% of the 1,900 exonerations in the registry.“In some cases, you see some type of explicit racism,” said Samuel Gross, a law professor at University of Michigan and a senior editor of the report. Implicit racism is also a factor, Gross said.Researchers focused on three types of crimes where black people were more likely than whites to be exonerated: murder, sexual assault and drug crimes. While they acknowledged that the causes of each exoneration “differ sharply from one type of crime to another,” they also said they found patterns of racial discrimination in all three groups.According to the researchers, innocent blacks are seven times more likely to be convicted of murder than innocent white people. Gross said this was partly because homicide rates among black people are higher than among white people, and innocent black people are therefore more likely to get suspected and convicted of murder. (According to data from the FBI, 52% of murder victims in 2014 were black and 46% were white, and 53% of offenders were black compared to 45% who were white).In addition, murder cases where a black defendant was wrongfully convicted were 22% more likely to involve police misconduct than those involving white defendants.Black people serving time for sexual assault are three-and-a-half times more likely to be innocent than white defendants that have been convicted of sexual assault. The bulk of the racial disparities in sexual assault convictions can be explained by white victims who mistakenly identify black assailants, said Gross, particularly when the victim is a white woman and the offender a black man.Gross said white people are less likely to accurately identify black faces — a concept known as “own race bias” in cross-racial identification.When it comes to drug crimes, innocent blacks were 12 times more likely to be convicted than innocent whites. While black and white people have similar rates of illegal drug use, black people are more likely to be arrested and convicted of such offenses than white people are, researchers found.To read more Click or Copy link below: -
Cops Pepper-Spray 84-Year-Old Woman After Kicking Down Her Door
AFRICANGLOBE : Editorial Staff
Police kicked open an 84-year-old Oklahoma woman’s front door and pepper-sprayed her during a search for her son, who was being hunted after allegedly failing to stop at a stop sign.
Police in the city of Muskogee, near Tulsa, released body camera footage of the incident that took place at about 2.30am on 7 August.
The video shows an officer kicking the front door open, shouting commands and tasering Arthur Blackmon, who appears to be standing still with his hands up, holding a mobile phone. About 30 seconds after Blackmon is tased, officer Michelle Casady is heard telling Geneva Smith, who is backing away: “Turn around, face that way now, or I’ll spray you.” She directs a brief burst of spray at the elderly woman’s head, causing her to reel.
“Hey! My mother is 84 years old, motherf*cker!” Blackmon yells, as she falls to the ground and cries, “Help me, Jesus.” A few seconds earlier, Smith had refused to get on the floor and told officers, “I ain’t turning round.”
Officers were chasing the 56-year-old after he allegedly ran a stop sign, drove to his mother’s house and failed to obey instructions to stay in his truck, then dashed into the home and refused to come out, according to police footage.
The Muskogee Phoenix said that Smith, who is Black, was initially cited for resisting an officer, but the citation was dropped, while Blackmon was charged with drunk-driving, obstructing an officer, driving with a suspended license and illegally carrying a weapon.
“I just came out and asked them what was going on and they just pepper-sprayed me,” Smith told Fox 23 local news, adding that she was taken to jail, then the hospital after falling ill, and still felt pain in her eye more than a week later.
Rex Eskridge, the chief of police, told the station that the department released the footage to be transparent. “Videos can’t give you the full sense of what happened but at the same time they do either validate or expose any warts that you might have,” he said.
The department has allegedly launched an internal investigation to determine whether officers complied with policy. Police said in a statement that they used “non-lethal force” because the mother and her son repeatedly failed “to comply with lawful commands”.
A spokesman said that police entered the house only after repeatedly attempting to make contact, then hearing yelling and a cry of “call 911!” from inside, prompting concern for the residents’ safety, especially given that the truck they had chased was not registered at that address.
“We can’t ignore the fact that there was wrong on both sides,” said Derrick Reed, a former local NAACP president and current city councilman for the ward where the incident took place. He praised the police for releasing the footage and being responsive to the concerns of community “leaders”, who are now waiting for the results of the investigation.
Muskogee police made news locally last year when they pepper-sprayed an African American mentally disabled man during an alleged search for a missing person at a home in the city, and nationally when an officer fatally shot a Black man who was allegedly fleeing then stopped to bend over and pick up what appeared to be a gun in the road.
“We have worked in Muskogee to build relationships with our police department and so I can’t say that all the force is bad but that night was a horrible night,” Reed said.
“Looking at the video, anyone would think there could have been other avenues that the Muskogee police department could have taken that night so the outcome wouldn’t be so horrific. Anyone seeing the video has to put in their mind that whether she was Black or white she was somebody’s grandmother, 84 years old, and there were seven police officers in the room … the image that’ll never escape my mind is there was an 84-year-old woman, pepper-sprayed, and could we have done something differently?”
That was an awful and condescending letter by Megan Thomas. I do think he should be included in the museum with all the hateful letters about his eagerness to destroy any young black male who comes to his court. I was actually looking for those letters before I made this post, but they seem to have been scrubbed from the internet.