African American Women, Mass Incarceration, and the Politics of Protection

Abstract

On November 28, 2013, Marissa Alexander was freed from a Florida prison after serving three years of her twenty-year sentence. Her crime: firing a warning shot during a confrontation with her estranged abusive husband—a man against whom she had a restraining order. Even after her release, however, Alexander was not out of the woods. While Judge James H. Daniel found the original jury instructions flawed and overturned her conviction, he denied her request for a new hearing under Florida’s stand-your-ground law, which had been amended to include warning shots in its allowance of force in the face of imminent threat. On July 21, 2014, Judge Daniel found that the amended statute “could not be applied retroactively.” Alexander’s experience brings into high relief the persistent biases in American justice, particularly given her case’s stark contrast to the George Zimmerman acquittal in 2013. Whereas Zimmerman successfully used the stand-your-ground defense after taking the life of the unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin in 2012, Alexander was unable to invoke the same protections. No one died and no one was hurt at the hands of the battered black woman, yet she received a twenty-year sentence. Alexander’s new trial was originally scheduled for December 2014, however in November of that year she accepted a plea deal that sent her to the Duval County Jail to serve an additional sixty-five days. The plea also included two years of probation for Alexander under “house detention and wearing a surveillance monitor.” She agreed to these terms rather than face the new charges filed against her—charges that could have amounted to a maximum of sixty years in prison. Alexander’s calamity is rooted in a tangled set of circumstances that ensnare black women when race, gender, violence, and criminal justice collide.1 Alexander’s case reflects the legacies of an exclusionary politics of protection whereby black women were not entitled to the law’s protection, though they could not escape its punishment. Structured by colonial and antebellum judiciaries, laws representing the priorities of enslavers effectively negated and criminalized black womanhood by subjecting