Black Rage Confronts the Law. Paul Harris

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СКАЧАТЬ white juries, white judges, and a white legal system with the rage, pride, and strength of black people.

      Between the 1930s and the 1970s the best-known black rage case was a fictional one. Richard Wright, in Native Son created the classic case of a lawyer arguing that the system of white supremacy had produced his client’s crimes. Although Native Son was published in 1940, Wright depicted the anguish and bottled-up fury experienced by many of today’s black youth. In the opening scene Bigger Thomas, a young black man, kills a huge rat that has attacked him in his family’s ghetto apartment. As his sister comforts their mother, Bigger tries to shut the crying out of his mind.

      He hated his family because he knew that they were suffering and that he was powerless to help them. He knew that the moment he allowed himself to feel to its fulness how they lived, the shame and misery of their lives, he would be swept out of himself with fear and despair. So he held toward them an attitude of iron reserve; he lived with them, but behind a wall, a curtain. And toward himself he was even more exacting. He knew that the moment he allowed what his life meant to enter fully into his consciousness, he would either kill himself or someone else. So he denied himself and acted tough.

      Bigger begins to work for a wealthy white family whose daughter Mary attempts to befriend him. One night, after heavy drinking, he helps her into her room and puts the semiconscious young woman in her bed. He then lies down next to her and kisses her. Suddenly, Mary’s blind mother knocks on the door. Terrified that he will be found in her bed, Bigger puts a pillow over Mary’s mouth to keep her quiet. She suffocates, and in a frenzy of fear Bigger tries to dispose of the body in the furnace. Later in the novel he murders his girlfriend because he is afraid that she will talk and give him away.

      Bigger is charged with murdering Mary and raping her (which he did not do). His lawyer knows that in the prejudiced public atmosphere there is no chance for a manslaughter verdict, so he has Bigger plead guilty. He then argues to the judge to give Bigger life imprisonment instead of the death penalty.

      Wright was a leftist, and in Native Son he created a Communist defense attorney who delivers a passionate indictment of racism. In the attorney’s plea for life imprisonment he attempts to answer the question of “why a man killed.” The answer he proposes is found in the nexus between racial oppression and Bigger’s life. This link between society and the individual is at the crux of the black rage defense.

      Thirty-one years after Native Son was written, black rage and black pride became the defining characteristics of two seminal criminal cases. The murder trial of a Chrysler autoworker in Detroit and the bank robbery trial of an unemployed draftsman in San Francisco were the incarnation of what became known as the black rage defense.

      What is the black rage defense? It is a legal strategy that centers on the racial oppression experienced by the defendant. It is an attempt to explain to the judge and jury how the defendant’s environment contributed to his or her crime. It shows how concrete instances of racial discrimination impacted on the mental state of the defendant.

      It is essential to understand that the black rage defense is not an independent, freestanding defense. That is, one cannot argue that a defendant should be acquitted of murdering his boss because the boss fired him out of racial prejudice. The innovation inherent in the black rage defense is that it merges racial oppression with more conventional criminal defenses.

      The law has always recognized state-of-mind defenses. For example, if a person is insane at the time of the criminal act, he can raise his mental condition as a defense. So if, in the above example, the white boss’s racist behavior caused the black worker to lose the ability to control himself, a defense of diminished capacity would be allowed. Such a defense would reduce first-degree murder to second-degree murder or manslaughter. Another example is a young African American surrounded by three skinheads wearing Nazi symbols and calling him “nigger.” If he pulls a gun and shoots one of them, he can raise a self-defense claim. As part of the defense he would be allowed to argue that given his experience with racists it was “reasonable” for him to assume that he was in danger of serious bodily injury, and therefore it was legally justifiable to shoot before he was actually attacked.

      State-of-mind defenses allow us to bring the racial reality of America into the court by presenting “social context” or “social framework” evidence. I have also described it to judges as “social reality” or “racial reality” evidence. The phrase “black rage defense” describes a lawyer’s gestalt, a theory of the case, an all-emcompassing strategy that uses racial reality evidence to establish self-defense, diminished capacity, insanity, mistake of fact, duress, or other state-of-mind defenses allowed by the criminal law.

      In a larger sense, the black rage defense educates the judge and jury about society’s role in contributing to the criminal act. It is part of a growing body of recognized criminal defenses that have forced the courts to consider the effects of environmental hardship. The Vietnam Vet Syndrome and post-traumatic stress disorder used to defend veterans scarred by the war in Vietnam and African American teenagers scarred by the war in urban America illustrates state-of-mind defenses rooted in social reality. The battered woman defense parallels the black rage defense, in introducing evidence of gender oppression in defense of women charged with crimes of violence against their abusive husbands and boyfriends. The cultural defense, another rapidly growing legal strategy, uses evidence of a defendant’s culture (e.g., Laotian and Vietnamese refugees, Chinese immigrants, or Native Americans) to explain his or her state-of-mind in defense or mitigation of criminal charges.

      One major misconception surrounding the black rage defense is that it is a race hatred defense. This notion grew out of cases such as that of Colin Ferguson. Ferguson is the Jamaican immigrant living in New York who killed six people and wounded nineteen others on a Long Island commuter train in 1993. Initially his lawyers said they were going to use a black rage defense as part of an insanity claim. Ferguson later fired them and represented himself, denying that he had done the shootings. In the massive publicity surrounding the case many pundits portrayed the black rage defense as an attempt to justify violence against white people solely on the basis of previous racial oppression. Commentators also criticized the defense as an abdication of individual responsibility. These criticisms are enshrined in Alan Dershowitz’s book The Abuse Excuse, which attacks all environmentally based defenses.

      In fact, no black rage defense has ever argued that African Americans are entitled to attack whites solely because of a history of oppression. However, the improper use of the defense by well-meaning lawyers can leave an impression that racial violence against individual whites is a legitimate response to racial discrimination. A mistaken strategy can also lead to a “poor-me” characterization of the defendant. A review of actual cases reveals that judges and juries will reject a defense based on race hatred or victimization.

      These inaccurate stereotypes of black rage cases can be symbolized by the picture of an angry black male with a gun in his hand standing over a dead white man. In fact, the cases include all types of crimes, and the black rage defense is often used in positive situations such as self-defense. Nor is it limited to men—African American women also feel agony, grief, misery and anger. The richness of African American literature reminds us of their rage. Just a few years after the success of Native Son, Ann Petry’s novel The Street was published. Petry’s heroine, Lutie Johnson, uses a candlestick to crush the skull of a black man who has abused her. Her violence is described as a reaction to a “lifetime of pent-up resentment.”

      First she was venting her rage against the dirty, crowded street. She saw the rows of dilapidated old houses; the small dark rooms; the long steep flights of stairs; the narrow dingy hallways; the little lost girls in Mrs. Hedges’ apartment; the smashed homes where the women did drudgery because their men had deserted them.

      Then the limp figure on the sofa became ... the insult in the moist-eyed glances of white men on the subway; became the unconcealed СКАЧАТЬ