BAW: Commentary: If You Want To Highlight Problems in the Criminal Justice System, There Are Plenty of Valid Examples: "I admit that when Black Entertainment Television recently elevated two of the Jena 6 defendants from being lucky to becoming luminaries, I was a bit conflicted. Not that I didn’t agree that Carwin Jones and Bryant Purvis – who escaped facing several years in prison on an attempted murder charge over a schoolyard beatdown – didn’t deserve some attention. They are, after all, symbols of the systematic racism that has far too many black men doing time for punishments that don’t fit the crime. "
What worried me, though, is whether their being hailed as celebrities when they are accused of beating a kid unconscious could send the wrong message to other impressionable black youths. I worried whether Jones and Purvis’ turn in the BET spotlight would obscure what the real message should be; that it is far smarter to avoid getting entangled in the criminal justice system in the first place if it means you have to count on national outrage to free you.
Yet if BET wants to use its award shows to trot out black people who have been wronged by the criminal justice system, I’m all right with that. I’m all right with that because there are lots of those people to go around – and many with cases more compelling than that of the Jena 6.
One of those people is Michael Anthony Williams.
Williams is 43 now. Like the Jena 6 he lives in Louisiana. Like the Jena 6 he was a teenager when he was accused of a crime; he was accused of raping and beating his high school tutor.
Unlike the Jena 6, though, he did wind up in prison - Did 24 years hard time in the notorious Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, in fact.
But unlike the Jena 6, Williams didn’t do the crime.
After spending several years trying to clear his name, he was exonerated two years ago by DNA testing. As it turned out, Williams had spent half his life in prison based largely on the testimony of a woman who didn’t even see her attacker. His tutor’s head was covered during the attack, but she told prosecutors that she recognized Williams’ voice.
That was enough to persuade a jury to lock him away for life without parole. At age 16.
But now, according to The Wall Street Journal, Williams is struggling to adjust to life on the outside. He had to fight to get a state representative to write a bill to compensate him for $150,000 – or around $6,300 a year for each year he spent in prison.
That’s a pittance. A pittance that has done little to help Williams get back a life that he never had a chance to develop. He has virtually no job skills. He was imprisoned before he learned to drive – a time-honored teenage rite of passage. He had never seen a cell phone, or used a computer.
He has to sleep with the lights on because he can’t get used to sleeping in the dark.
To ease his readjustment Williams said he hopes to join a community of exonerees who, like him, were freed through the efforts of the Innocence Project – an organization whose efforts have led to the release of more than 200 prisoners who have been proven innocent by DNA testing. But the project needs more money to help the former inmates – many of whom are black – who are struggling with depression and other psychological trauma after years of being locked up and then spat out into a world that, to them, might as well be Mars.
BET should champion that cause – and highlight someone like Williams on one of its award shows.
Sure exonerees like him may not be young anymore. They may not project the hip-hop generation aura that I’m sure Jones and Purvis projected – and that BET audiences eat up with a spoon.
But when it comes to the criminal injustice system, people like Williams illustrate something that transcends hairsplitting about whether black miscreants will receive equal justice compared to white miscreants. People like him illustrate the fact that in many cases, innocent black people don’t get any justice at all.
They show us that as we fume over black people who caught the short end of the stick after they got caught up in the system, there still are scores of black people who weren’t involved in the system at all, yet it managed to suck them in and beat them down.
Such people ought to be worthy of a BET moment too. Especially since what happened to Williams could happen to any of us.
Without us doing anything wrong."
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