If They Come in the Morning, Voices of Resistance Building the Global Movement to Free Angela Davis

Twenty years ago, sixteen-year-old Brenda Spencer shocked the nation when she opened fire at Grover Cleveland Elementary, killing the principal and custodian, and wounding eight children. 1 In today's world, such horrifying school shootings have become almost commonplace.In 1997, two separate shooting rampages took the lives of seven students.The first occurred on October 1 in Pearl, Mississippi, when sixteen-year-old Luke Woodham killed his mother before killing three students and wounding seven others at his high school. 2 The second school shooting that year occurred on December 1 in West Paducah, Kentucky, when fourteen-year-old Michael Carneal killed three students at a morning high school prayer meeting. 3 In 1998, almost three times as many students lost their lives in school shootings.On March 24 in Jonesboro, Arkansas, thirteen-year-old Mitchell Johnson and eleven-year-old Andrew Golden killed four schoolmates and a teacher after setting the fire alarm to draw their victims out into their line of fire. 4 On May 21 in Springfield, Oregon, fifteen-year-old Kip Kinkel killed his parents and later opened fire in the school cafeteria, shooting twenty-four classmates, two fatally. 5 The largest, most frightening school massacre occurred on April 20, 1999, in Littleton, Colorado, when Eric Harris, eighteen, and Dylan Klebold, seventeen, opened fire at Columbine High School, killing thirteen people before taking their own lives.

When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best... They're sending people that have lots of problems... They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They are rapists.” With these words, Donald J. Trump announced his bid for the U.S. presidency at Trump Tower in Manhattan on June 16, 2015. Since taking the oath of office in January 2017, the controversies surrounding President Trump’s stance on immigration and the U.S.-Mexico border continue to make headlines and change lives. At stake in contemporary debates about Mexican immigration to the US are fundamental questions about American national identity and the United States’ role in the wider world: What is an American? Who can become one and how? To students of American history and culture, the resurgence of ethno-nationalism, and fear of/demonization of the foreign-born that has marked discourse about Mexican immigration in the Age of Trump strikes a familiar chord. As it turns out, xenophobia, hyper nationalism and charges of foreign criminality constitute a tradition in US politics that is as old as the republic- and as American as apple pie. Nowhere is this more evident than in the history of Southern Italian immigration to the United States prior to 1924. According to the most recognizable version of the story, the American connection with Southern Italy took shape between 1880 and 1920, when a series of chain migrations sent close to four million Italians (mostly Southern) to the United States in flight from the poverty and disorder plaguing the mezzogiorno in the first decades of Unification. During this transformative period, “patriotic” Nativists identified southern Italians as a critical threat to social order and the American way of life. Often depicted as backwards, superstitious aliens possessed by inborn traits of violence and criminality, Italians faced harassment, discrimination, prejudice and violence by American citizens and US-officials alike. From the lynching of eleven Sicilians in New Orleans on suspicion of criminal conspiracy in 1891, to the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti on murder charges in 1927, the history of anti-Italian sentiment in the US is well documented. What is less familiar is when and how the stereotype of Italian criminality took root in American culture. Equally opaque are the mechanisms through which these notions influenced immigration policy and foreign relations between Italy and the United States prior to the great waves of migration that began after Italian Unification in 1861. Tracing Americans’ ideas about Italians’ “national character” from 1776- 1865, this paper examines the perceptions and debates that defined American encounters with the first immigrants identified as a “criminal group” inside the United States: Italians. Comparing the views of critics and defenders of Italian’s alleged criminality alike, including Presidents Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, as well as novelists Washington Irving, Henry T. Tuckerman and Theodore Dwight, my work shows that a spectrum of opinion about Italy and the “Italian character” existed in the United States before the Civil war and that these ideas left a lasting legacy with measurable effects on American culture, foreign policy and immigration law through 1924. The essay concludes by reflecting on contemporary debates about immigration policy, the US-Mexico border and Trump-era discourse on the “character” of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans against the backdrop of Italian immigration to America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Retired pathologist Jack Kevorkian's assistance in the suicide of Janet Adkins, in June of 1990, did more than any other single action to make assisted suicide a hot button issue...

The nature of aggression during epileptic seizures

Kyung Richards spent seven years in a North Carolina prison on a murder charge. She grew up in an economically devastated region in rural Korea. As a teenager, she was raped. Not long after that incident, and after the death of her father, she began working in a bar close to a U.S. military base. Kyung began a relationship with a U.S. serviceman while still in her teens. They married and came to the United States, but her husband, who was an addict, became abusive and Kyung found herself on her own. Later she became involved with another man, also a former serviceman and also an addict who also became very abusive; and, after several years Kyung moved herself and her two young children to a motel. She found work at a local bar, but unable to afford child care, she left her children alone in the motel with the television on while she went to work. One day Kyung came home to find one of her children dead: Apparently her two-year-old son had tried to use a drawer in the bureau as a step in an attempt to reach the television, and both bureau and television fell on top of him. She called someone she knew, who advised her to call the police. Unaware of investigatory proceedings, she tidied up the motel room before police arrived; she was afraid that if the police saw an untidy room, they would take away her other child.

In 2008, there were 2.11 million arrests of persons younger than age 18 in the USA. (Puzzanchera 2009) The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) 2008 report “Crime in the United States” compiles the data reported within the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program which collects arrest statistics from law enforcement agencies across the USA. The data reflects the number of arrests, not the number of individuals arrested, and only records a count of the most serious charge for a particular arrest. Therefore it does not reflect the number of offenses resulting in a single arrest. Despite this limitation, the database offers information on the number of juvenile arrests, the number of individuals entering the justice system, the trends in these arrests and the ethnic and gender differences. For the period 1999–2008, there is a decline in all juvenile offenses leading to arrest, with the exception of robberies, which increased. Juveniles accounted for 16% of all violent crime arrests and for 26% of all property crime arrests in 2008. The violent crime index has fallen significantly from a high in 1994. There was a 10-year decline trend in the violent crime index for the period 1994–2004, reaching a 49% decrease in 2004, then a 12% increase for 2004–2006 and a new 5% decline for 2006–2008. Youth younger than 15 accounted for more than one-fourth of all juvenile arrests, 29% for violent crime offenses and 27% for property crime offenses. Only 1% of juvenile arrests are of youth younger than age 10. In 2008, the number of reported forcible rape offenses was at its lowest since 1980. In 2008, the juvenile arrest rate on murder charges was 3.8 arrests per 100,000 juveniles ages 10–17, a decline of 5% from 2007, and 74% down from a 1993 peak of 14.4. Between 1999 and 2008, juvenile arrests for aggravated assault decreased for males, more than for females (22% vs. 17%). During the same period, juvenile male arrests declined 6%, but female arrests increased 12% for simple assault. In 2008, females accounted for 17% of juvenile violent crime arrests, 36% of juvenile property crime arrests, and 44% of the juvenile larceny-theft arrests. In 2008, there were 629,800 arrests of females younger than age 18; accounting for 30% of the total juvenile arrests. Simple assaults, larceny-theft and driving under the influence, all increased in females from 1999 to 2008, while male arrests decreased in these categories. The data shows a downward trend in juvenile crime; but increase in crime committed by females, especially “petty” crime. This may mean that the population of female delinquents in detention is on the rise, gender ratios are changing and so are pathology and emotional issues encountered in juvenile justice settings, posing a new set of challenges for service programming.

Donald J. Trump launched his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination in June 2015 by comments on illegal immigrants and the crime they commit in the United States. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you,” he said. “They’re sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists, and some, I assume, are good people.” A few weeks after Trump’s announcement, 32‐​year‐​old Kate Steinle was shot and killed by an illegal immigrant Jose Inez Garcia Zarate in San Francisco, California. Although Zarate was later acquitted of all murder and manslaughter charges due to mistakes made by the prosecutor, his shooting of Steinle seemed to support Trump’s worry about illegal immigrants causing a crime spree and helped win him the election in 2016. As tragic as the shooting and death of Kate Steinle was, it was one of the 13,455 murders that year in the United States and it does not tell us how many of those victims were murdered by illegal immigrants. The most important measure that matters when judging the crime rates of illegal immigrants is how likely they are to be criminals compared to other sub‐​populations. If illegal immigrants are more likely to be criminals then their presence in the United States would raise crime rates, supporting Trump’s assertions. But if illegal immigrants are less likely to commit crime then they would lower the nationwide crime rate. Politically, this debate spills over to evaluating whether domestic immigration enforcement policies reduce crime. Illegal immigrant crime is also central to the debate over sanctuary jurisdictions that refuse to turn over many illegal immigrants to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the effects of a border wall, and whether Border Patrol requires more resources to counter crime along the border. Answering whether illegal immigrants are particularly crime prone is essential to addressing these concerns and setting efficient anti‐​crime policies.

Today, persons with intellectual and related disabilities are being seen as citizens in full standing in their own neighborhoods. We see them on the street, on buses, in restaurants—even attending classes in their own neighborhood schools and working at jobs they are able to do. It wasn’t always that way. In earlier years they were seen as objects of rejection. Most were removed from their communities and sent to live in large, out-of-the-way, state-funded institutions. Now that they are back in the midst of our neighborhoods, we are learning to understand and support them as never before. Most—but not all—seek to be friendly with local police officers. They do it because they need to depend on authority figures around them to live in the community successfully. Police officers need to know that some tend to be overly vulnerable and pliable when placed under pressure in interrogation rooms. In such a situation they may say whatever these authority figures want to hear. They will even confess to crimes they did not commit. Today, 53 persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities have confessed to serious felonies—murder, rape, arson, and robbery—that they did not commit. These cases have been extracted from three sources: They come from my own 30year collection of files and from sifting through a list of all false confessors produced earlier by two of the top experts on all false confessions (Drizin & Leo, 2004). More recently they have been sifted from a constant stream of false confession reports flowing out of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University’s School of Law. All of the 53 individuals have been legally exonerated. The number of persons on this list will increase in the years to come. For example, I can name 15 other false confessors with intellectual disabilities I believe to be innocent, but they will not be placed on this list until they have been exonerated by a formal legal action. Six factors gleaned from this list may be worth pondering:

European Court of Human Rights: Judgment in Soering Case(Breach of European Convention on Human Rights; Extradition of German National From United Kingdom to United States for Trial on Charge of Murder, a Capital Crime)

In 2009, President Obama signed an Executive Order calling for strategies to improve the health of Asian Americans and to seek data on the health disparities in Asian American subgroups.1 Data on Asian American subgroups are scarce and many health disparities remain unknown. The purpose of this Advisory is to highlight the gaps in existing research on cardiovascular disease (CVD) among Asian Americans, and to serve as a call to action on behalf of the American Heart Association to address these areas of need. Asian Americans are the fastest growing racial/ethnic group in the United States, representing 25% of all foreign-born people in the United States.2 They are projected to reach nearly 34 million by 2050.3 Several major Federal surveys (eg, the American Community Survey, the National Health Interview Survey, and the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey) only recently started to classify Asian Americans into 7 subgroups: Asian Indian, Chinese, Filipino, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Other Asian. The first six of these subgroups together constitute >90% of Asian Americans in the United States.4 Although some data are available on Asian subgroups from these major federal surveys, in general, these data are not available for public use because of the privacy concerns resulting from the small sample sizes within subgroups. This situation limits their utility for health-related research. Because health surveys and questionnaires almost universally combine persons of Asian ancestry into a single group, the heterogeneity within this classification is masked. Socioeconomic and cultural factors have been found to be associated with CVD and its risk factors, which is why it is important to understand these differences among Asian subgroups. The Table shows the number of persons in each group based on the most recent US Census data available (American Community Survey, 2008), with the recognition that …

The United States is almost alone among nations in permitting the execution of juvenile offenders. Citing this fact, along with a variety of legal materials, litigants and scholars are increasingly claiming that the United States' use of the juvenile death penalty violates international law. This Article examines the validity of this claim, from the perspective of both the international legal system and the U.S. legal system. Based on a detailed examination of the United States' interaction with treaty regimes and international institutions since the late 1940s, the Article concludes that the international law arguments against the juvenile death penalty have significant weaknesses. As the Article documents, for a number of reasons the United States has consistently declined to consent to treaty provisions restricting the juvenile death penalty, and it has consistently declared the human rights treaties that contain such restrictions to be non-self-executing. In addition, since at least the mid-1980s, the United States has persistently objected to - and thereby legally opted out of - any customary international law restriction on the juvenile death penalty. The Article also argues that, even if these international law arguments were more persuasive, they would not provide a basis for relief in U.S. courts. For separation of powers reasons, courts properly will decline to apply international law to override the considered choices of the President and Senate in their ratification of treaties. In addition, because of concerns relating to both separation of powers and federalism, courts properly will decline to apply customary international law to override state criminal punishment, especially when (as is the case here) the political branches have expressly declined to do so by treaty. This potential gap between evolving international law norms and U.S. judicial enforcement is less disturbing than some commentators appear to assume - it simply means that the juvenile death penalty issue, like other difficult issues of social policy in the United States, must be resolved through U.S. democratic and constitutional processes. Although important on its own terms, the juvenile death penalty issue may also have broader implications for the relationship between U.S. law and international human rights law. Litigants and scholars have met with at least modest success in attempting to have international human rights law incorporated into the U.S. legal system. This success, however, has primarily come in the context of civil lawsuits seeking damages for human rights abuses committed in foreign countries. Increasingly, litigants and scholars are seeking to build on this success and persuade U.S. courts to apply international human rights law internally as a basis for overriding domestic laws and practices. The juvenile death penalty has become a central focus of this effort, and the way in which the international law challenges are resolved in this context may have a significant impact on the viability of other attempts to domesticate international human rights law.

The United States is almost alone among nations in permitting the execution of juvenile offenders. Citing this fact, along with a variety of legal materials, litigants and scholars are increasingly claiming that the United States' use of the juvenile death penalty violates international law. This Article examines the validity of this claim, from the perspective of both the international legal system and the U.S. legal system. Based on a detailed examination of the United States' interaction with treaty regimes and international institutions since the late 1940s, the Article concludes that the international law arguments against the juvenile death penalty have significant weaknesses. As the Article documents, for a number of reasons the United States has consistently declined to consent to treaty provisions restricting the juvenile death penalty, and it has consistently declared the human rights treaties that contain such restrictions to be non-self-executing. In addition, since at least the mid-1980s, the United States has persistently objected to - and thereby legally opted out of - any customary international law restriction on the juvenile death penalty. The Article also argues that, even if these international law arguments were more persuasive, they would not provide a basis for relief in U.S. courts. For separation of powers reasons, courts properly will decline to apply international law to override the considered choices of the President and Senate in their ratification of treaties. In addition, because of concerns relating to both separation of powers and federalism, courts properly will decline to apply customary international law to override state criminal punishment, especially when (as is the case here) the political branches have expressly declined to do so by treaty. This potential gap between evolving international law norms and U.S. judicial enforcement is less disturbing than some commentators appear to assume - it simply means that the juvenile death penalty issue, like other difficult issues of social policy in the United States, must be resolved through U.S. democratic and constitutional processes. Although important on its own terms, the juvenile death penalty issue may also have broader implications for the relationship between U.S. law and international human rights law. Litigants and scholars have met with at least modest success in attempting to have international human rights law incorporated into the U.S. legal system. This success, however, has primarily come in the context of civil lawsuits seeking damages for human rights abuses committed in foreign countries. Increasingly, litigants and scholars are seeking to build on this success and persuade U.S. courts to apply international human rights law internally as a basis for overriding domestic laws and practices. The juvenile death penalty has become a central focus of this effort, and the way in which the international law challenges are resolved in this context may have a significant impact on the viability of other attempts to domesticate international human rights law.

“I couldn't live with killing one of my friends or anybody”: A rapid ethnographic study of drug sellers’ use of drug checking

Thurgood Marshall: The Influence of a Raconteur Sandra Day O’Connor Editor’s Note: Thisarticle-wasoriginallyprinted in 44 Stanford Law Review 1217 (1992). It is reprinted by permission. © 1992 by the Board of Trustees ofthe LelandStanfordJunior University. I was fresh out ofStanford Law School, work­ ing as a civilian attorney in the Quartermaster Market Center, the day Thurgood Marshall changed the nation. He had been chipping away at the building blocks of a separatist society long before 1954, ofcourse, but it was through Brown v. Board ofEducation' that he compelled us, as a nation, to come to grips with some ofthe contra­ dictions within ourselves. Like most ofmy counterparts who grew up in the Southwest in the 1930s and 1940s, I had not The Burger Court the day of Justice O'Connor’s investiture. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and Justice Thurgood Marshall served on the Court together for ten years. Both were firsts: the first woman and the first African-American to become an Associate Justice. 10 JOURNAL 1992 been personally exposed to racial tensions before Brown-, Arizona did not have a large AfricanAmerican population then, and unlike Southern states, it never adopted ac/ejure system ofsegre­ gation. Although I had spent a year as an eighth grader in a predominately Latino public school in New Mexico, I had no personal sense, as the plaintiffchildren ofTopekaSchool Districtdid, of being a minority in a society that cared primarily for the majority. But as I listened that day to Justice Marshall talk eloquently to the media about the social stigmas and lost opportunities suffered by Afri­ can-American children in state-imposed segre­ gated schools, my awareness of race-based dis­ parities deepened. 1 did not, could not, know it then, but the man who would, as a lawyer and jurist, captivate the nation would also, as col­ league and friend, profoundly influence me. Although all ofus come to the Court with our own personal histories and experiences, Justice Marshall brought a special perspective. His was the eye of a lawyer who had seen the deepest wounds in the social fabric and used law to help heal them. His was the ear of a counselor who understood the vulnerabilities of the accused and established safeguards for their protection. His was the mouth ofa man who knew the anguish of the silenced and gave them a voice. At oral argument and conference meetings, in opinions and dissents, Justice Marshall imparted not only his legal acumen but also his life experi­ ences, constantly pushing and prodding us to respond not only to the persuasiveness of legal argument but also to the power of moral truth. Although 1 was continually inspired by his historic achievements, 1 have perhaps been most personally affected by Justice Marshall as raconPeabody Conservatory of Music MT. VERNON PLACE AND CHARLES STREET BALTIMORE, MD. CONSERVATORY OFFICE Virginia Oartv. Secretary Harold Randolph, Director 'S'« nexus . *•<«*,? A -I February 22, 1926. Cornelius tfeshington, 1333 Chapel St., Norfolk, Ta. Dear Siri I am sorry, but no colored stu­ dents are aooepted at the Peabody Conservatory. Very truly yours. Thurgood Marshall spent much ofhis career using the legal system to fight racial discrimination. Racially restrictive admissions policies in education, such as those shown in this letter, were one of his major priorities. MARSHALL TRIBUTE 11 teur. It was rare during our conference delibera­ tions that he would not share an anecdote, ajoke or a story; yet, in my ten years on the bench with him, I cannot recall ever hearing the same “TM” story twice. In my early months as the junior Justice, I lookedforwardtothesetalesas welcome diversions from the heavy, often troublesome, task of deciding the complex legal issues before us. But over time, as I heard more clearly what JusticeMarshallwas saying, Irealizedthatbehind most ofthe anecdotes was a relevant legal point. I was particularly moved by a story Justice Marshall told during the time the Court was con­ sidering a case in which an African-American defendant challenged his death sentence as ra­ cially biased. Something in the conversation caused his eyebrows to raise characteristically, and with a pregnant pause, to say: “That reminds me of a story.” And so it began, this depiction of justice in operation. “You know,” he said: I had an innocent man once. He was accused ofraping awhitewoman. The government told me if he would plead guilty, he’d only get life. I said I couldn’t makethatdecision; I’d have to ask my client. So I told him that if he pleaded guilty, he wouldn’t get the death sentence. He said, “Plead guilty to what?” I said, “Plead guilty to rape.” He said, “Raping thatwoman? You gotta be kidding. I won’t do it.” That’s when I knew I had an inno­ cent man. When thejudge sentthejurors out, he told them that they had three choices: Notguilty, guilty, orguiltywith mercy. “You understand those are the three different possible choices,” he instructed. But after the jury left, the judge told the people in the courtroom that they were not to move before the bailifftook the defendant away. I said, “What happened to ‘not guilty’?” The judge looked at me, and said, “Are you kidding?” Just like that. And he was the “judge.” As he neared the end of his tale, Justice Marshall leaned forward, pointed his finger at no one in particular, and said with his characteristic signal offinals, “E-e-e-endofthe Story. The guy was found guilty and sentenced to death. But he neverraped that woman.” He paused, flicking his hand. “Oh well,” he added, “he wasjusta Negro.” With the aid ofthis low-key narrative, Justice Marshall made his own legal position quite clear: in his view the death penalty was not only cruel and unusual punishmentin violation ofthe Eighth Amendment, it had never been, and could never be, administered fairly and free of racial bias. Although I disagreed with Justice Marshall about the constitutionalvalidity ofthe deathpenalty, his story made clear what legal briefs often obscure: the impactoflegal rules onhuman lives. Through his story, Justice Marshall reminded us, once again, that the law is not an abstract concept removedfromthe societyitserves, andthatjudges, as safeguarded of the Constitution, must con­ stantly strive to narrow the gap between the ideal ofequaljustice andtherealityofsocial inequality. Justice Marshall’s stories served for me an­ other function. Beneath his wit and charm and rambunctiousness, he is an intenselyprivate man; there are sides to him no one but his family will everknow. Butovertheyears, ashe sharedstories of Kianviolenceandjurybias, ofco-optedjudges anddishonestpoliticians,Ihave gainedan insight, a peephole really, into the characterofa manwho is atonceeternallyatpeaceandperpetuallyatwar. “S-a-a-a-n-d-r-a-a-a,” he calledout once, “did I ever tell you about the welcome I received in Mississippi?” Itwas early evening in a smalltown in Mississippi in the early 1940s and he was waitingto hop the nexttrainto Shreveport. “I was starving,” he told me, “so I decided to go over to thisrestaurantandsee ifone ofthe cookswould let me in the back to buy a sandwich. You know, that’s how we did things then; the front door was so inconvenient!”Beforehecouldgo over, Justice Marshall recounted, “a man ofyour race holding a pistol sidled up. ‘Boy,’ he said, ‘what are you doing in these parts?’ I said, ‘I’m waitingto catch the next train.’ He said, ‘Listen up boy because I’m only gonna tell you this once. The last train throughhereisatfourp.m. andyoubetterbeonitcuz niggers ain’t welcome in these parts after dark.’” “Guess what,” Justice Marshall added, a twinklecreepingintohis eye, “Iwasonthattrain.” WhatJusticeMarshalldidnotsay,whathehad no need to say, was how physically threatening 12 JOURNAL 1992 The arraignment of George Crawford on murder charges in Leesburg, VA in 1933 brought out an array of legal talent for his defense. Left to right, front, Walter White and Edward P. Lovette. Back, James G, Tyson, Leon A. Ranscome and Charles Houston. Houston was Marshall’s mentor at Howard University and continued to influence his career long after graduation. and personally humiliating the situation must have been. Left unspoken, too, was the anger and frustration any grown man must have felt at being called “boy” and run out oftown. It is not surpris­ ing, really, that these sentiments are relegated to the backdrop; unlike many national figures, Jus­ tice Marshall is not interested in publicizing the risks he has taken or the sacrifices he made. Instinctively,he downplayshis own role, as though it were natural to hide under train seats, or earn $2,400 a year as a lawyer, or write briefs on a manual typewriter balanced, in a moving car, between his knees. To Justice Marshall, these hardships warrant no comment; they are simply the natural extension ofa lifetime credo of“doing the best you can with what you’ve got.” But to those ofus who have traveleda different road, Justice Marshall’s experiences are a source ofamazementand inspiration, not only because of what they reveal about him but also because of what they instill in, and ask of, us. I have not encountered prejudice on a sustained basis. But I have experienced gender discrimination enough, such as when law firms would only hire me, a “lady lawyer,” as a legal secretary, to understand how one could seek to minimize interaction with those who are intolerant of difference. That Justice Marshall never hid from prejudice but thrusthimself, instead, into its midsthas beenboth an encouragement and a challenge to me. I asked him, once, how he managed to avoid becoming despondent from the injustices he saw. MARSHALL TRIBUTE 13 Instead of responding directly, he told me about the time he and his mentor, Charles Hamilton Houston, the vice-dean at Howard Law School, traveled to Loudon County, Virginia, to help a manontrialforhis life.Theman, GeorgeCrawford, had been indicted by an all-white grand jury of murdering a white woman from a well-to-do Virginia family, as well as her white maid. De­ spite their defense challenge to the exclusion of African-Americans from thejury, Crawford was convicted of murder by an all-white jury, and sentenced to life. “You know something is wrong with the government’s case,” Justice Marshall told me, “when aNegro only gets life formurder­ ing a white woman.” After the trial, Justice Marshall said, the mediaaskedifCrawfordplannedan appealbased on the exclusion ofAfrican-Americans from the jury. “Crawford said, ‘Mr. Houston, if I have another trial, and I got life this time, could they kill me the next time?’ Charlie told him yes. So Crawford told Charlie: ‘Tell them the defendant rests.’” “I still have mixed feelings about that case,” Justice Marshall added. “I just don’t believe that guy got a fair shake. But what are you going to do?” he asked. “There are only two choices in life: stop andgo on. You tellme, whatwould you pick?” Evennow, I stillthinkaboutJusticeMarshall’s backhanded response, wondering how one con­ fronts, as he did, the darkest recesses of human nature—bigotry, hatred, and selfishness—and emerge wholly intact. Although I probably will never completely understand, part ofthe answer, I think, lies in his capacity fornarration itself. His stories reflect a truly expansive personality, the perspective of a man who immerses himself in human suffering andthen translatesthat suffering in away thatothers can bearand understand. The past he relates—doused in humor and sadness, tragedy and triumph—is but a minor ofhimself: a man who sees the worldexactly as it is and pushes on to make it what it can become. No one could helpbutbemovedbyJusticeThurgoodMarshall’s spirit; no one could avoidbeing touchedbyhis soul. As I continue on the bench, a few seats down from where he once sat, I think often of Justice Marshall. I remember the morning we first met and the afternoon he left the bench. I remember thehistoric law suitshebroughtandthethoughtful opinions and dissents he wrote. I recall his unwaveringcommitmenttothepoor, the accused, and the downtrodden, and his constant, impas­ sionedrepudiationofthedeathpenalty. Morethan that, though, I think of the raconteur himself. Occasionally,atConferencemeetings, I stillcatch myself looking expectantly for his raised brow and his twinkling eye, hoping to hear, just once more, anotherstorythatwould, by andby, perhaps change the way I see the world. Endnotes ' 347 U.S. 483 (1954). ...

Abstract(Editor's Note: On August 18, 1971, the Republic of New Afrika (RNA) Residence in Jackson, Miss., was raided by police and FBI agents who were allegedly seeking a fugitive. The fugitive was not there but agents and police surrounded the house and opened fire in the windows 75 seconds after arriving. In the attack one officer was killed and two others wounded, resulting in the arrests of 11 RNA citizens—including President Obadele (who was not in the Residence at the time of the shooting but was arrested at the RNA office)- on charges of murder, assault with a deadly weapon and “waging war against the state of Mississippi.” In the summer of 1973 seven RNA citizens were ultimately indicted, tried, found guilty, and jailed. The FBI conducted a successful campaign to prevent companies from posting bond in an effort to “neutralize” Obadele as a leader by keeping him in jail. After several unsuccessful appeals, Imari Obadele remains imprisoned at the federal penitentiary in Atlanta (Box PMB 00807190, Atlanta, GA 30315). Under law he is eligible for parole release in a few months but prison authorities have taken two steps to prevent his release: (1) he will not receive credit for the 21 months spent in jail in Mississippi, and (2) he is among those classified as an “extremely dangerous offender” whose release would “depreciate the seriousness of the offense or promote disrespect for the law. “He has been designated a political prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International. In this letter the word “We” is capitalized and “i” is lower-cased because, according to Brother Imari, “It is a principle of New Afrikan thought that the community is more important than the individual.”)