[CPRB] injustice system

[Ricky Baldwin]

This is due to turn up in the News-Gazette Sunday, I
understand.  Thought it would be of interest to most
of us ...

Ricky

THE INJUSTICE SYSTEM IN CHAMPAIGN COUNTY

By Belden Fields

      Recent events have convinced me that the justice
system in Champaign County is skewed against the
African American population and should be more
properly referred to as an injustice system. There
have been excessive charges against blacks,
retaliatory prosecution and even reprosecution to
achieve a guilty

verdict, and differential treatment for sexual
offenses when the accused are

black and when the accused are police officers or
members of the bar. There

have also been five deaths in the county jail since
2004, the majority of them

African-Americans.

      The excessive charges center on felony
eavesdropping and obstruction of justice. Felony
eavesdropping was the charge originally levied against
Patrick Thompson and Martell Miller after they were
arrested for filming and recording Champaign police
stops of African American motorists and cyclists to
document racial profiling. The felony eavesdropping
law was intended by the Legislature to

punish people for taping phone calls, conversations,
or interviews without

permission. It was never intended to be used against
people monitoring police

behavior. But the Champaign Police and the state's
attorneys office, then under

John Piland, decided to try to stop black activists
from monitoring police

behavior through this egregious misuse of the law. 

      Another form of excessive charging is
obstruction of justice. Giving

the wrong name, or even a nickname, to a police
officer has traditionally

been treated as a misdemeanor. Felony obstruction of
justice has usually been

considered interfering with or derailing police work
or lying to the police

concerning the facts of a crime. But the local

police and the courts used the felony charge against
Terrell Layfield, an

African American man who one of the three officially
acknowledged suicides in the county jail in the last
two years. Layfield had been acquitted of a drug
felony charge, but he was sentenced to 66 months in
prison for giving the officer the wrong name at the
time of the arrest.

Before losing the state's attorney office to Julia
Reitz in 2004, Piland dropped

the eavesdropping charge against Miller, but not
against Patrick Thompson. He

also instituted a charge of illegal entry and sexual
abuse against Thompson.

Reitz dropped the eavesdropping charges against
Thompson but did not drop

illegal entry and sexual abuse charges. Because of
Reitz's prior contact with Thompson, the prosecution
was turned over to a special state prosecutor.
Thompson defended himself at the first trial. The jury
was unable to convict. The state retried him. He faced
a jury that had only one black person, hardly a jury
of his peers. The Urbana Police failed to inspect the
alleged crime scene and collected no physical evidence
(e.g., fingerprints on the door knob) of a crime.
While the prosecutor attempted to discredit the black
defense witness by raising her conviction for
obstruction of justice , there was no scrutiny of any
legal history of the white accuser nor of possible
similar accusations made by her in the past. Yet
Thompson was convicted and is to be sentenced Monday.

      Let us compare how the legal system treats
whites who have faced sexual abuse charges. In 2001, a
white dean of students at Franklin Middle School in

Champaign, Brady Smith, was caught on tape soliciting
sex from one of his

14-year-old African American students. More black
students came forward to say

he had solicited sex from them. The dean was a former
probation officer with

friends in the state's attorneys office. He lost his
job at the school, but his

only legal punishment for preying on black students
was probation and court

costs and fees.

      Last year an on-duty Urbana police officer, Kurt
Hjort, was accused by a woman of driving a squad car
to her apartment, entering it without invitation in
full

uniform including gun and cuffs, and forcing sexual
intercourse upon her. The

officer was fired. The woman sued both the city and
the police chief, the

latter because she contended that he knew of three
previous cases of sexual

abuses commuted by the officer while he was on duty.
State's Attorney Julia

Reitz recused herself because she is married to an
Urbana officer and knew the

accused socially. Judge Difanis appointed James Dedman
as special prosecutor.

The prosecutor decided that there would be no criminal
charges, that the

officer had already been punished enough by losing his
job. The accusations

against him, home invasion and actual rape, _were even
more serious than those

against Thompson. Yet the city settled with the
accuser for an undisclosed total

and the officer walks the streets untried.

      Also last year, Brain Silverman, a law partner
of Dedman , was accused of

committing a degrading sexual act on a black woman
whose boyfriend was his

client, and thus at the mercy of the attorney.
Silverman faced no criminal

prosecution or even permanent disbarment. His only
punishment was a nine-month suspension from practicing
law. This man has been a public defender, paid by
taxpayers to defend, not to abuse, the indigent and
the powerless.

      I urge those who find this double standard
injustice unacceptable to express this to Judge
Difanis, State's Attorney Reitz, Illinois Attorney
General Lisa Madigan, and because there are federal
equal protection of the laws issues, to U.S. Rep. Tim
Johnson and U.S. Sens. Dick Durbin and Barack Obama. I
also urge people to contact the Champaign-Urbana
Citizens for Peace and Justice HYPERLINK
"mailto:cu_citizens at yahoogroups.com", which is trying

to put an end to these disparities.

_

Belden Fields is professor emeritus of political
science at the University of

Illinois and author of "Rethinking Human Rights for
the New Millennium" (2003).

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