Yolanda Young

Opinion contributor

“It is worse to be poor and innocent than rich and guilty” in America. That's what a capital defense attorney once told me.

I was reminded Saturday of her statement as I and the rest of the nation watched the Senate vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh — a judge who was accused of sexual assault — to the Supreme Court.

It's impossible to know whether Kavanaugh is guilty of the things that Christine Blasey Ford accused him of when they were both in high school. But it isn't hard to see how an attitude of entitlement (propped up by wealth and class) brings men like Kavanaugh an advantage in our criminal justice system.

It's the same attitude that President Donald Trump surely related to when he nominated and later defended Kavanaugh from allegations of assault, the same attitude that inspired others to call for only a week-long FBI investigation — not nearly enough time to conduct a sufficient number of interviews. It's the same attitude of entitlement and privilege that pushed the Trump administration to order only a limited investigation.

Poor and convicted — without belligerence

I’m from the nation’s death row capital in Caddo Parish, La., where the wrongfully convicted are resigned, not belligerent like Kavanaugh was during those hearings.

The fury with which he responded to Ford’s allegation (that as a teen he had sexually assaulted her) has been deemed a reasonable, even appropriate, reaction of one falsely accused. Men like Kavanaugh — white, wealthy, powerful — have confessed to identifying with him. And so they would. They are likely also not used to their actions being questioned.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., implied that if Kavanaugh hadn't ascended to the Supreme Court (and was instead forced to remain on the D.C. appellate court) the judge's life would have been ruined.

Kavanaugh and Graham both believed this knowing, as a judge and former attorney respectively, that another America exists, one they surely saw in the courtroom.

In that other world, the National Registry of Exonerations reports that since 1989, there have been more than 2,000 people found guilty and locked up for crimes they didn't commit. They were eventually exonerated, but that figure doesn't include the likely thousands more who were released without the state ever admitting wrongful conviction, leaving them stuck with a record for the rest of their lives. Among those former inmates, more than 20,000 years of their lives have been lost.

From 2010 to 2014, in Louisiana's Caddo Parish, more people per capita were sentenced to death than in any other place in America. That state also happens to produce more wrongful convictions than any other in the country — and it's one of the poorest.

If only the same level of empathy reserved for Kavanaugh were directed at injustices with much graver consequences.

Glenn Ford, a black man who spent three decades in Louisiana's Angola prison, had been sentenced to death by an all-white jury in the murder of jeweler Isadore Rozeman. He received a full exoneration, then died of lung cancer shortly after his release.

Marty Stroud, the prosecutor in Ford's case, was so ashamed of how he handled it that he asked the Louisiana Bar Association to discipline him. When I asked Stroud what he remembered from the case, he told me about a moment following the verdict, when Ford, who had done odd jobs to make a living, stated simply, humbly and without aggression: “I’m innocent.”

I also talked to Stroud about Rodricus Crawford, a black male who had no criminal record and was sentenced to death in the murder of his 1-year-old son. The Louisiana Supreme Court eventually overturned the conviction after medical reports indicated that the baby had died of pneumonia. Former acting Caddo Parish District Attorney Dale Cox was also found to have targeted blacks for removal from the jury.

Before Crawford was released, his attorney provided me with a statement from the exonerated man: "One thing I’ve realized since I’ve been here is that this case isn’t about me. I spent a lot of time feeling sorry for myself, but it’s not about me. It’s not about Dale Cox. I forgive Dale Cox, I forgive him. It’s bigger than that. It’s about my son. ... And it’s about the system that this came out of, that allowed this to happen. It’s about all the people out there locked up, innocent."

Wielding justice system power

The power to potentially exonerate a man named Lester Bower Jr. once landed in the hands of Kavanaugh, and hinged on FBI information.

Bower was sentenced to death three decades ago in the killing of four men in Dallas. He requested that the FBI turn over what he believed would be exculpatory evidence. The request made its way to Kavanaugh, who was on the appellate court that decided to deny it.

On June 3, 2015, Bower, at 67, became the oldest Texas prisoner executed since capital punishment was resumed more than 30 years prior. He felt he had been wrongfully convicted, but his last words, just before he was given a lethal injection, weren’t out of anger or aggression but of pragmatism: “Much has been said about this case. Much has been written about this case. Not all of it has been the truth. But the time for discerning truth is over, and it's time to move on."

His statement, under much more dire circumstances, was a great contrast to Kavanaugh's attitude of entitlement and expectation that justice should bend his way.

Hopefully, the newly minted Supreme Court justice's belief that he was wrongly accused will inspire empathy toward those who will now come before him with similar testimony.

Yolanda Young is the executive director of Lawyers of Color. Follow her on Twitter at @yolandayoungesq.