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NATIONAL
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Correcting justice: When the system fails
by Gordon Jackson
Special to the NNPA from the Dallas Examiner
Dallas (NNPA) - District Attorney Craig Watkins has come to clean house, the jailhouse. Watkins said he hopes to be able to right more wrongs similar to cases like those of the 16 individuals recently released after DNA evidence proved they had been incarcerated for crimes they did not commit.
“I’m going to do the right thing,” Watkins said, “So that 20, 30, 40 years from now, when I’m on my deathbed, I can die in peace, because I did the right thing. What’s been happening here has not been right.
“Everybody thinks that the civil rights struggle is over, it’s not. There’s a new civil rights struggle, dealing with criminal justice,” said Dallas’ first Black District Attorney at a criminal justice forum, recently hosted by the Dallas-Fort Worth Association of Black Journalists.
Watkins served on a panel, which also included Joyce Ann Brown, Curtis Wilbert, Tyrone Brown and James Waller. Randy McIlwain, reporter for NBC5, moderated the forum. Of the five panelist at the forum, three of them had served time for crimes they did not commit and one had been given a life sentence for what’s usually a misdemeanor charge.
Watkins stated that with help from the New York-based Innocence Project, all of the 434 cases of murders, rapes and other felonies he has on his books would be reviewed for potential DNA testing. He said that 16 of the 32 cases reviewed so far have been overturned, including 12 high-profile cases, Waller’s and Brown’s cases among them.
“We’ve got to change the way we look at the criminal justice system and do certain things to make sure that we don’t have people who look like us, or any other folks, being labeled as criminals for the rest of their lives,” said Watkins.
Mr. Brown, accompanied by his mother Nora, gave a distinct sense of how things felt for him. Brown committed a $2 robbery at age 17, where no one was hurt. After violating his parole by testing positive for marijuana, he was sentenced to life by a Dallas judge.
“It started sinking in,” Brown said. “I said, ‘Man, I could be here for the rest of my life.’”
Brown’s description of prison life confirmed it was not a haven of rehabilitation and rebuilding, but an enclosed jungle of criminal activity. In fact, many of his encounters came with the prison guards.
“They could just say that you threatened them,” he said.
“They don’t need any evidence, they can just write you up. They say it’s a place [prison] for real rehabilitation, but it’s not really, it only makes you madder.”
Brown said he was forced to join a gang inside the prison to keep him from being harmed or killed. “You’ve got to find out quick who you’re going to get along with and who you’re not going to get along with,” Brown said. That action would then be put on his record.
Waller, who had been accused for the rape of a woman in 1982, felt that the courts knew he was innocent, but was nevertheless sentenced to 30 years in prison. Waller said he served, “10 years, 11 months and three days” of the sentence and was labeled a sex-offender after he got out. He recently received a full pardon after DNA testing proved his innocence.
“Everybody told me I had a hanging judge,” Waller said. “I couldn’t believe that you could get time for something you haven’t done.” Waller, a tall and slender man, found out that the original suspect in his case was seven inches shorter than he was.
“There’s no way you could mistake a man 5-foot-9 for a man who’s 6-4,” Waller stated. “They knew I was innocent from day one.”
Curtis Wilbert, who has devoted his life to helping the incarcerated, after wrongfully serving three and half years for aggravated assault, called for a different direction on how all formerly incarcerated should be treated by society.
“For those who are wrongly incarcerated, or for even those who have done the crime, once they’re released, they need to be exonerated,” Wilbert said.
“We need to wipe their slate clean and need to try and educate those people. As they enter into society, we need to put our arms around these people.”
Wilbert, an officer with the Texas Association for the Formerly Incarcerated, campaigned for “Block the Box,” a law that would allow parolees not to check the box on a job application that ask if they committed a felony. He called for more programs to support ex-convicts.
“Anybody who spends one day in a cage is not the same once you’re released,” Wilbert said. ‘You’re locked up like a caged dog, told when you can sleep, wake up, urinate, talk on the phone. Mentally, it’s a drain on you. These people are our next-door neighbors, they go to our churches, go to our grocery stores. They eat at the same places you do. They’re like new born babies.”
Wilbert commended Nora Brown for continuing to support her son, who was just released five days earlier through a conditional pardon by Governor Rick Perry.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Nora responded to Tyrone’s life sentence. “It was hard on me and my other kids. I told him, I don’t know when and how, but you’re not going to serve life. One of theses days, you’re going to come out of there.”
“When you go to prison, not only do you suffer, your children suffer, your mother suffers, everybody suffers around you,” Wilbert said.
Joyce Ann Brown, unrelated to Tyrone Brown, spoke about dealing with her anger toward the judge. Ms. Brown said such feelings should go further. “Why be angry at the judge? We should be angry at the system. The system allowed that to happen,” said Ms. Brown, who channeled her anger into constructive energy and is now founder and executive director of MASS, Mothers (Fathers) for the Advancement of Social Systems, Inc.
“A lot of them come out and go back in, not because they have to, but because they want three hots [meals] and a cot, because society has blocked them out,” Brown said.
“We say that they paid their debt to society and all is well. But they come home and can’t find a job, housing or anything to put food on the table. What do you think they’re going to do? They’re going to get back into a life of crime.”
Another answer is at the polls, said Watkins.
“After all these exonerations came out that we have on these folks who didn’t commit these crimes on DNA, we need to get up and go vote,” he said. “Make sure we elect folks that don’t sit on that bench and make decisions that will tarnish a person for the rest of their lives. We need to get
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