This is a story the other Bros already know, but I thought I'd share it with our enormous readership.
For those thousands of you that don't know me personally, I am currently working construction without a contract. This means I get paid the day of my labor in cash without tax. Normally, the work I do involves digging ditches, jackhammering, sanding, painting, stacking lumber, lifting up a very heavy house (using jacks), scraping, and/or picking up and putting down assorted heavy things. A couple months ago, however, I was assigned a different sort of task: go out to Gretna and try and get Kyron George out of jail.
Gretna, for those of you unfamiliar with the suburbs surrounding New Orleans, is on the West Bank, which means that it is across the Mississippi River from New Orleans proper. All you need to know about the West Bank is that it's free to go over there but you have to pay a dollar to get back. Kyron is a fellow laborer of mine. He is a 23 year old African-American man with a one year old son, a Graduate Equivalency Diploma, and hypertension. In the past two years he has been arrested for Grand Theft Auto (a car he was picked up in by a friend), and possession of marijuana with intent to distribute (it was an ounce of weed. He was going to smoke, not sell. Drug laws are colossally stupid because they were made by people who didn't do drugs on the advice of people who had no idea what they were talking about). Kyron doesn't always make great decisions, but he's a good guy and Matt (my employer and friend) and I wanted to help him out of a jam if we could. Matt told me to go to the courthouse and tell them that Kyron was employed part time and that Matt was willing to withhold some of Kyron's payment to go towards bail. Simple enough.
I put on a suit and went out to the West Bank, where Kyron was being held in connection with the drug arrest, first thing on a Wednesday morning to make the 9:00 hearing. By the time I got into the courtroom the defendants were seated. The defendents consisted of sixteen men on the left side of the room, Kyron included, and three women on the right side. The sixteen men were put into two rows, eight apiece. All of the men were in handcuffs, and the handcuffs of the men in each row were attached to a linked steel chain that bound them all together. So, for those readers that were under the impression that our justice system no longer used chain gangs, you were mistaken. Demographically, the sixteen men consisted of fourteen black men, one latino man, and one white man. All three women were white. They had no chain.
This hearing, probably better referred to as an arraignment, was conducted in a cattle call fashion. It went like this: the judge, a dark complected white woman in early middle age, would call out a defendant's name and tell him/her to rise. They would do so, and she would ask if they had a lawyer. The defendants invariably said no. The judge then asked if they had the money to afford a lawyer. Again, universal nos. The judge then assigned the defendants to the public defender's office and a young blonde woman who appeared to be in her early 30's sitting to the right of the judge and in front of the male defendants would pipe up and say "Karen Johnson representing the public defender's office and temporarily representing the defendant." The judge would then ask for a plea and Ms. Johnson would say "not guilty." The judge would set a price for bail, then look at the defendant and say "You'll be meeting with your attorney shortly" or something to that affect. Both women seemed like decent people, but this point in the proceeding was the only time when either of them would actually look at the defendants.
Here's the thing, though: Kyron's turn didn't go exactly that way. When it came time to assign his bond, the judge said "Now, you missed your last court date so you'll be held without bail until your trial on April 4th." It was March 4th. This came as a surprise. I was sitting next to Kyron's mother, DeAndra (aka Dee), and she hissed into my ear that he had appeared in court and that this was a load of crap. I assured her that as soon as the arraignment was over we'd figure out what all this was about. We were in the middle of this conversation and the last person was being told they'd be meeting their lawyer soon when Kyron collapsed.
As I sort of alluded to earlier, Kyron is an enormous, obese young man. He's probably 6'3", 320 pounds, so when he fell out of his chair, the seven other defendants he was chained to fell with him. The reaction of the room was strikingly subdued. Neither the judge nor the public defender said anything nor did they respond physically. The families of the other defendants shifted uncomfortably as if we were suddenly at a cocktail party and someone had made an off-color joke. Not even the defendants dragged to the ground had much to say, except the one white guy, a hick from south Louisiana who complained loudly about how uncomfortable this made his wrists. All this uncomfortable silence made Dee's screams of "My baby!" and "He's stroking!" more jarring.
After that initial reaction, Dee hustled out of the courtroom and I was left in a tough position: go console the mother who's just seen her child collapse or stay and see to my friend? I opted for the latter, at least for the moment. Kyron was helped back into his chair by his fellow inmates as the two guard looked on. I went as close to his side as the barrier would allow to ask if he was okay. I instinctively reached out to him but was told not to touch him by the guards, who made their way between the two of us. Kyron's head was sort of lolling back and forth, but he grunted when I asked if he wanted me to fetch his mother, so off I went.
I didn't have to go far. Dee was just outside the courtroom collecting herself with the assistance of Kyron's girlfriend, who'd left the scene with her. I gave Dee a hug and she stopped crying. We all three went back into the courtroom to find that the guards had released Kyron from his handcuffs and were talking to one another about what to do next very casually. With additional give, the inmates had scooted a bit further apart, causing the swamp rat to complain ever more. He became the centerpiece of a din that also consisted of Dee telling anyone who'd listen that Kyron had hypertension and that she thought he was having a stroke, me telling the guards they ought to do something, and the guards bouncing ideas off each other ("Should we call the medic? Should we get a wheelchair?") with all the urgency of tossing stones into a lake on a summer's evening. This whole time, the young Hispanic inmate, whose arms were involuntarily crossed by the taut chain, kept patting the non-verbal Kyron on the shoulder and telling him he'd be alright. It was a painfully beautiful human gesture, and I might have been the only one who noticed
This lasted about twenty minutes until the guards, a sort of goofy looking white woman and a young black man, finally decided to make the effort to reach for their walkie-talkies and call for a wheelchair. Ten minutes later a still semi-conscious Kyron was being wheeled out of the room and we were told he was being taken to the jail about a block away. We rushed over and Kyron's mother insisted he be taken to the nearby hospital for care. The guard, another tall dark-haired bespectacled goofy looking white woman (there appear to be a lot of these working in the Louisiana penal system), made a phone call and informed us this was not possible but that we needn't worry because they had two registered nurses and one person who was "the same as a doctor." I tried to stress to her that "the same as a doctor" is not, in fact, the same thing as a doctor and that if indeed Kyron was having a stroke they would be criminally liable. The guard asked me if I was Mr. George's lawyer, a question I'd also been asked in the courtroom. I said no and she went back to her Sudoku.
What seemed like hours but was probably only twenty minutes went by. During that time I met Kyron's former lawyer from the public defender's office. At least, he thought he had been. He had no real memory of the case, nor did he seem very interested. Dee called all of her relatives and sent them into a panic. She made clear that she intended to call the news if anything happened to her son. This prompted me to think how good an episode of This American Life this might make when someone came out and told us that Kyron had come to and that, while they intended to keep him under observation for another 24 hours, he appeared to be fine and that he had just fainted. Relieved, we returned to the courthouse to sort out the matter which had caused Kyron to faint in the first place: the surprise bonus month he'd been given in the lovely and exotic Jefferson Parish Prison.
Dee, Kyron's girlfriend and I bounced around a few offices and courtrooms until we landed in the waiting room of the judge who had actually rescinded Kyron's eligibility for bail. During the non-screaming segments of the recent drama, Dee had explained to me why she'd left the courtroom after Kyron collapsed and why his being held without bail was unfounded:
1. Hysterical black women make bad impressions in courtrooms.
2. Kyron and his mother had showed up to the court date in question and found he wasn't on the docket. They were told that he wouldn't be able to appear in front of the judge that day and that they'd send a notice regarding his new court date. They never received any such notice.
Anyway, the waiting room we were in was a lot like a dentist's office. There were four chairs, a stand with magazines on it, and a cubicle which contained two clerks of the court, chipper white women in their thirties. As soon as we walked in, Dee excused herself for the bathroom, so I decided to get the ball rolling. I approached the window and told the women I was there regarding Kyron George's case.
"Oh, are you his lawyer?" the older of the two women asked.
"I'm a representative of his employer," I responded.
"Oh, he's working?" the same woman asked.
"Yes ma'am," I said.
"Full time?" she inquired.
"No ma'am. He's working about 25 hours a week at ten dollars an hour doing construction in the Irish Channel which he'd be happy to put towards bail, but his probation appears to have been withdrawn because he missed a court date. His mother claims that they never received a notice of that court date."
"Oh, okay," she said. "We'll go ahead and let him out, then. Brittany," she said, addressing the other clerk, "could you go ahead and draw up a release form for Kyron George effective immediately?"
That was it! Bear in mind, astonished readers, I had produced no proof of employment, no identification, I HADN'T EVEN TOLD HER MY NAME! Just then, Dee came back into the waiting room and I told her they were letting Kyron out. She looked a little dazed, and asked if I was serious. I told her I was, and that she should probably work out how to best pay bail installments with the clerk. She told the clerk that she could bring in $300 two days later, and the clerk said that was fine and she just needed to sign the paper Brittany had just printed out. An hour later, Kyron was released, and Dee insisted on buying me lunch some time, which she later did.
At first glance, these appear to be two largely unrelated stories, one about a morbidly obese man collapsing in a courtroom, and one about an untrained legal wunderkind and they are only tied together by the fact that they happened to me concurrently on the same morning. But it's better to think of it in terms of how two young men of around the same age are treated based on appearances. Kyron was being held in prison for holding an amount of marijuana I have held before, as have many of my white friends, and when he collapsed, he was treated with indifference and given terrible medical attention. I was an anonymous white guy in a suit who was given a prisoner just because I asked. These stories are best told in tandem to anyone who thinks race isn't an issue in the judicial system.
No comments:
Post a Comment