Behind Courtroom Doors

Why courts deserve the same public scrutiny as cops

By Manohar Raju

Oscar Grant. Michael Brown. Tamir Rice. Eric Garner. Walter Scott. Freddie Gray. Their names have become rallying cries to end police violence against people of color. But while a new generation of civil rights activists takes to the streets, a less visible dehumanization happens routinely behind courtroom doors.

Inequality under the law is a problem that is hard to capture on video, but it’s something my public defender colleagues and I witness each day.

It translates to convictions that frustrate educational and job opportunities. It leads to years locked in cages away from loved ones. It’s a dehumanization more common than police brutality, but its results are often just as painful for the families affected.

Blacks are disproportionately arrested in relation to the frequency of breaking the law. That doesn’t bother some people because they believe that if those arrested are ultimately innocent, the court process will protect them.

Tragically, the ideology of American due process is a far cry from its reality.

African Americans rack up convictions after arrests not because they are more likely to be guilty, but rather because the deck is stacked against them in court. Every public defender knows the realities our clients, who are disproportionately black, face:

Prosecutors routinely overcharge our clients. It is not uncommon for prosecutors to load up multiple charges on one complaint to coerce people to plead guilty to a single charge that carries a lengthy sentence. They also routinely inflate charges in the hopes that, if the case goes to trial, jurors will compromise and convict on a lesser charge —even if that charge is not proven.

Bail is uniformly too high for the vast majority of public defender clients to afford, forcing many clients to plead guilty just to get out of jail. Prosecutors regularly procure guilty pleas from people by offering them “get out today” deals. It sends a backward message: “Even though you can’t be out of custody when you are presumed innocent, we will let you out if you plead guilty.”

Defense attorneys and their clients are often hesitant to go to trial on winnable cases because too many judges allow juries to consider a client’s previous convictions — many of which were obtained as a result of overcharging and high bail. Additionally, because of a prior conviction, the time that our clients face if convicted skyrockets, making the risk too large even for innocent clients.

The culture of most courthouses discourages jury trials. To go to court means facing a series of microaggressions meant to intimidate ordinary citizens and discourage them from exercising their constitutional right to a jury trial. Generally, clients are roused before dawn only to wait for hours in a single room the size of a storage unit.

The room is packed with about 20 people who share one open toilet.

This happens day after day until a courtroom opens up. Judges often directly and indirectly try to frighten clients and their attorneys by intimating they will be punished for exercising their right to a jury trial with a harsher sentence than if they had accepted a plea deal. Public defenders that push a hard line and aggressively represent their clients in trial are often labeled “unreasonable.”

Information that may help our clients’ cases is often withheld from the defense by prosecutors. It’s a practice that violates due process, as ruled by the U.S. Supreme Court its landmark case Brady v. Maryland. The Chief Judge of the San Francisco-based 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, lamenting that too many judges refuse to check prosecutors for this abhorrent and unconstitutional practice, recently wrote that, “There is an epidemic of Brady violations across the land. Only judges can put a stop to it.”

Trials are far more difficult for public defender clients than any other clients because they cannot get a jury of their peers. The county I practice in, San Francisco, has skyrocketing real estate prices and the fastest growing income inequality in the nation. It is quickly becoming a city for the rich — prohibitively expensive for the middle class, let alone the poor, except for some pockets of public housing that are largely populated by blacks. This is a common urban trend. Our African American clients most often go to trial seeing no black faces in the jury box. The everyday realities our clients face are foreign to the bulk of jurors who sit in judgment. As a result, clients often plead guilty to avoid an unfair trial.

Our black clients fear that they are more likely to be sentenced harshly than their white counterparts. They’re right. Even in lower level federal felony cases, where sentencing guidelines are designed to supposedly produce fair outcomes, black clients with the same record receive sentences that are 5.5 months longer than their white counterparts.

Put simply, public defender clients — most of whom are poor and black — get treated worse than anyone else in the legal system.

When structural racism and biases pervade courthouses, people’s lives — and the lives of their families — are ravaged by unjust prison sentences. The scrutiny with which the public is now watching police shootings on video needs to be applied equally to American courthouses.