Sen. Barack Obama joined hands with Charlene Drew Jarvis, left, and Howard University President H. Patrick Swygert, during his visit as keynote speaker at convocation today. Photo by Chuck Kennedy/MCT
by Mike Dorning
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama promised today to right “glaring inequities” in the U.S. justice system that he said were exposed by local prosecutors’ handling of a racially charged fight among high school students in Jena, La.
“We know these inequities are there,” Obama said in a speech at the historically black Howard University in Washington, D.C. ” We know they’re wrong. And yet they go largely unnoticed.”
The Illinois senator has been accused by some black activists, most notably the Rev. Jesse Jackson, of insufficient passion in his response to the Jena 6 incident. Jackson told a South Carolina newspaper that Obama was “acting like he’s white” as he criticized Obama for not participating in the protest march in Jena, La. Jackson later said the remark was taken out of context.
Six black high school students in Jena were charged with attempted murder for a fight with white students after white students hung nooses in a schoolyard tree. The students who hung the nooses—which appeared after black students tried to sit under a shade tree that previously had been used only by white students–were not charged with a crime or expelled from school.
With his speech at Howard, Obama turned to the Jena incident as an object lesson to assert broad structural disparities in the way the criminal justice system treats members of minority groups and offered his vision for addressing them. Obama cited lengthy prison terms for first-time drug offenders and disparate sentences for users of crack versus powder cocaine, both aspects of the criminal code that disproportionately affect members of minority groups.
He suggested that the controversy over Jena demonstrated the disparities of the justice system in much the same way that devastation after Hurrican Katrina illustrated the plight of the poor in America
“It reminds us of the fact that we have a system that locks away too many young, first-time, non-violent offenders for the better part of their lives – a decision that’s made not by a judge in a courtroom, but all too often by politicians in Washington and state capitals across the country,” Obama said. “It reminds us that we have certain sentences that are based less on the kind of crime you commit than where you come from or what you look like.
“It reminds us that we have a Justice Department whose idea of prosecuting civil rights violations is trying to rollback affirmative action programs at our college and universities; a Justice Department whose idea of prosecuting voting rights violations is to look for voting fraud in black and Latino communities where voting fraud does not exist.”
Obama promised to work to eliminate the disparity in sentencing for crack cocaine users and to change laws to steer more first-time drug offenders to rehabilitation programs rather than prison terms.
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He said he would try to improve the quality of public defenders with programs to forgive the law school loans of attorneys who defend low-income defendants, who are disproportionately members of minority groups.
Poor defenses mounted by public defenders frequently have been cited as contributing factors in the wrongful convictions of innocent Death Row inmates that have been overturned in recent years. Obama noted in his speech that the public defender handling the case of one of the Jena Six defendants did not call a single witness for his defense case.
He also said he would reverse the Bush Administration’s priorities for the Justice Department’s civil rights and voting rights sections and step up prosecutions of hate crimes and efforts to suppress minority voter turnout.