Interracial Violence and Racialized Narratives: Discovering the Road Less Traveled

Abstract

Anthony Alfieri's recent essay, Defending Racial Violence, analyzes various models of legal argumentation and strategy. The essay focuses on the trial of two men charged with attacking a white trucker during the Los Angeles uprising sparked by the acquittal of four white police officers who brutalized Rodney King. After examining what he calls the rhetorical structure of defense arguments in the case, Alfieri reaches some interesting conclusions, which he would apparently generalize to all cases of black-on-white Alfieri asserts that race-based narratives of - stories of ghettoized deprivation, neglect, and resulting pathologies - are used by criminal defense attorneys to hone arguments that mar their clients' legal identities and distort the integrity of the entire community. According to his analysis, when defense attorneys present narratives of black deviance they depict the collective community as virtually incapable of exercising morally choices. Alfieri, though, seems far less concerned with libel than with what he characterizes as depersonalization of individual responsibility for violent behavior. The essay, which does not offer any version of a tentative Model Rule of Professional Responsibility, proposes as a matter of ethical responsibility that lawyers be constrained in one of two ways. Alfieri argues that lawyers should either be precluded from utilizing narratives of black deviance, or be held responsible for the absence of lawyer-client consultations concerning defense strategies and perceptions related to moral character and community integrity. Besides the inherent difficulty of reaching a consensus on all the dynamics that affect high-profile cases, which - in the United States - include interracial crimes of violence, Alfieri's proposal to ban black deviance narratives is unworkable for many different reasons. First and foremost, the proposal remains disconnected from any concrete goal or objective that a rule making body could effectively monitor or control, assuming possessed the requisite authority. Second, the case study method is ineffective for advancing Alfieri's claim. If his argument is that men who commit violent crimes against innocent whites are getting away with it or that defense lawyers in such cases routinely argue that these defendants are mostly blameless (under a black deviance theory), he has failed to make his case. If, instead, he simply believes that is morally wrong for attorneys to intentionally and recklessly depict America as lacking in the properties of mind and character necessary for moral agency under any circumstances, then he should seriously examine the conduct of a representative sample of criminal defense attorneys to determine if such a problem actually exists. Instead, Alfieri merely points to a series of neutral arguments orchestrated by defense attorneys in a single case - arguments which he urges his readers to construe as suggesting race-based deviance. Relying heavily upon his knowledge of the defendants' and victim's races, Alfieri never substantiates his claim that the lawyers' presentation of the group contagion diminished capacity defense uniquely implicates only community character and behavior, in Los Angeles or elsewhere. Yet, Alfieri justifies his proposal by arguing that use of the mob-violence incited defense in this trial suggests that young males as a group, and the community as a whole, share a pathological tendency to commit acts of violence. The principal flaw of Alfieri's essay is that in all but one of the passages that he presents as a form of race-talk, defense lawyers easily could have been describing a white community, and two white defendants who grew up in a predominantly white environment. Prior to issuing a blanket prohibition, Alfieri should have determined whether legal narratives of black deviance are a significant source of harm to the social identities or integrity of African Americans.