Glen Ford<\/em><\/p>\n Black Americans know all about \u201claw and order\u201d: the term, itself, is code for the state-wielded hammer that is relentlessly deployed against us. No people on earth are more conditioned to concentrated bludgeoning under \u201ccolor of law\u201d than African Americans, who account for one out of out eight of the world\u2019s prison inmates. Black males are 21 times more likely than their white peers to be killed by U.S. lawmen, and make up a clear majority<\/a> of young police shooting victims under the most draconian law and order regime on the planet. Of all the world\u2019s peoples, none have been so unremittingly inculcated with the lessons of crime and punishment \u2014 especially punishment, whether merited or not.<\/p>\n For a people so acculturated, justice demands retribution \u2014 even for Pharaoh and his army. Thus, the simple and near-universal Black American demand that President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder prosecute killer cops.<\/p>\n But, this they will not do.<\/p>\n The Obama administration has no intention of pursuing prosecution of Darren Wilson, or Trayvon Martin\u2019s vigilante killer George Zimmerman, or the whole crew of New York City homicidal and\/or depravedly indifferent first-responders in the Eric Garner case. Obama and Holder have nothing worthwhile to say to thenine grieving Black mothers<\/a> now visiting Washington demanding justice for their murdered loved ones, other than empty assurances that they feel the families\u2019 pain.<\/p>\n The U.S. Justice Department, which marshals unlimited resources to pursue long and sometimes fruitless prosecutions of whistleblowers and other \u201cnational security\u201d targets, claims it is helpless to confront police impunity in the murder of Black Americans. The law, Holder and his apologists claim, requires that federal criminal prosecutions under the civil rights statute must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the officers \u201cacted willfully\u201d for the specific purpose of violating the victim\u2019s 4th Amendment constitutional right to life. Making that case, they say, is near-impossible, requiring that prosecutors \u201cget inside the officer\u2019s head\u201d to divine his intentions at the moment the trigger was pulled. Therefore, despite Holder and Obama\u2019s public statements of concern, no good faith attempt is made to mount prosecutions.<\/p>\n The Michigan branch of the American Civil Liberties Union doesn\u2019t buy that argument. In an article in this issue of BAR<\/a>, ACLU lawyer Mark Fancher, a counsel in the case of the police \u201ccircular firing squad\u201d killing of Milton Hall<\/a>, in Saginaw, Michigan, contends that the law fully supports charges of \u201copen defiance\u201d or \u201creckless disregard\u201d for the constitutional rights of the victims in such case. Although prosecutions of police are more difficult than trying civilians, the ACLU cites U.S. Supreme Court and federal appellate<\/a> rulings from 1945, 1972, 1993 and 1997, that continue to sustain the vitality of the original, Reconstruction era federal statue forbidding deprivation of constitutional rights, including the right to life, \u201cunder cover of law\u201d \u2014 that is, by police. \u201cIt is enough…if it can be proved \u2014 by circumstantial evidence or otherwise \u2014 that a defendant exhibited reckless disregard for a constitutional or federal right,\u201d according to U.S. v. Johnstone, 1997.<\/p>\n That\u2019s not nearly as high a bar to a good faith prosecution as federal officials contend, and an easy argument for any federal prosecutor to make before malleable grand juries. Whether an actual trial jury convicts the cop is a different story, but the prosecutor has an obligation to pursue justice to the full extent of the law. It is not \u201cthe law\u201d that stands like a brick wall of impunity for police, but the interpretation of the law by attorneys general and their subordinates who view prosecutions of police as akin to unnatural acts that cannot be performed in public view.<\/p>\n As Atty. Fancher writes, it is \u201chard to imagine why charges cannot be brought when police officers fire dozens of bullets at a homeless man armed only with a pen knife; or when police use a choke hold to put a submissive man on the ground because he was alleged to be engaged in unauthorized cigarette sales. By almost anyone\u2019s reckoning, such conduct should be regarded as \u2018open defiance\u2019 or \u2018reckless disregard\u2019 for the constitutional rights of the victims.\u201d<\/p>\n In refusing to prosecute, Obama and Holder demonstrate their own profound disregard for the collective rights of Black Americans as a people. Police immunity from prosecution begins with the prosecutors. If the Obama regime were serious about establishing \u201ctrust\u201d between Black America and the authorities, as they claim, they would begin with a campaign of police prosecutions for \u201creckless disregard\u201d and \u201copen defiance\u201d of Black people\u2019s constitutional rights. There is no lack of actionable cases. As BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley writes: \u201cThere is no need for more task forces or advisory commissions. The police must stop killing black people with impunity and nothing will make that less likely to happen than the sight of Wilson and his partners in crime sitting in federal prisons.\u201d<\/p>\n The penalty for \u201creckless disregard\u201d of people\u2019s constitutional rights, involving violence, is ten years in prison and a stiff fine.<\/p>\n Of course, the feds and their state and local counterparts will not break their pact with the police \u2014 not until a people in angry, righteous motion create conditions of ungovernability in America\u2019s cities that allows no other choice. Police impunity is the domestic counterpart of the legal immunity that U.S. military personnel enjoy overseas. The U.S. deploys troops in the majority of countries in the world, but does not station soldiers anywhere in the absence of Status of Forces Agreements (SOFA) granting them immunity from prosecution under the host country\u2019s laws. Failure to secure an extension of the SOFA agreement with Iraq required the withdrawal of U.S. troops, in 2010. The United States claims it has not joined the International Criminal Court because, among other reasons, compliance with the treaty could lead to \u201cforeign\u201d prosecution of its military personnel.<\/p>\n Essentially, prosecutors in the United States maintain an informal kind of Status of Forces Agreement, immunizing the police from prosecution in the deaths of Black and brown \u201cnatives\u201d in the areas they occupy. At home and abroad, the armed forces of the racist, imperial State are beyond the law. As such, their very presence is an affront to human dignity. That\u2019s just as true in Ferguson and Oakland and New York City, as it is in Kabul and Ouagadougou and Bogota.<\/p>\n This piece<\/a> was reprinted by RINF Alternative News<\/a> with permission or license.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cIn refusing to prosecute, Obama and Holder demonstrate their own profound disregard for the collective rights of Black Americans as a people.\u201d Glen Ford Black Americans know all about \u201claw and order\u201d: the term, itself, is code for the state-wielded hammer that is relentlessly deployed against us. No people on earth are more conditioned to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":136899,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,1616],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-142591","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"category-usa-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=142591"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142591\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/136899"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=142591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=142591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=142591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\u201cPolice immunity from prosecution begins with the prosecutors.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u201cThe feds and their state and local counterparts will not break their pact with the police \u2014 not until a people in angry, righteous motion create conditions of ungovernability in America\u2019s cities that allows no other choice.\u201d<\/h5>\n