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Lynching law created to protect blacks used against protester: Column

As long as biases remain in justice system, so should challenges to arrests




(Photo: Charles Krupa, AP)

California Black Lives Matter organizer Jasmine “Abdullah” Richards became the first black person in the United States Tuesday to be sentenced for what, until last year, was considered attempted felony lynching.
If her appeal fails, Richards — who is currently serving part of a 90-day sentence — will face three years of probation and a year of anger management under a state anti-lynching statute originally created to protect blacks, not penalize them.
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USA TODAY

Policing the USA

The law was established in 1933 to stop white supremacist mobs from kidnapping and lynching blacks detained by law enforcement. It makes illegal any attempt to remove someone from police custody by riot. Richards, a Pasadena, Calif., resident, was taken into custody after challenging an arrest during an August protest that the activist had organized.
California Gov. Jerry Brown quietly reworded the statute in 2015 to remove the word “lynching” after another Black Lives Matter protester, Maile Hampton, was arrested and charged under the statute. Hampton's charge was downgraded to a misdemeanor.
The question that has frequently surfaced since Richards' conviction: Even if the old lynching law was inappropriately applied, shouldn't there be someconsequence for removing or attempting to remove someone from police custody? Answering that question requires a radical change in modern-day approaches to policing — one that starts with acknowledging that the justice system is plagued with human error and racial bias.
Richards hails from a community that's just minutes from Los Angeles — an area of the country where police have developed a reputation (dating back to the1991 beating of taxi driver Rodney King) for the targeting and harassment of black people. Removing a black person from police custody, given law enforcement's history, is seen by many activists as a life-saving action. Had someone interrupted the arrests of Sandra Bland, the black woman who was found hanging in her Texas jail cell, or Freddie Gray, the young black male who died while in Baltimore police custody, their fate's may have ended very differently.

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The numbers behind brutality re-enforce the story of bias among law enforcement. According to [url=http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/08/14/police-killings-data/14060357/]a USA TODAY special investigation reported in 2014, a white police officer killed a black person nearly two times a week during a seven-year period ending in 2012.
And recent, high-profile court cases also show how the justice system frequently shields white males from punishments that should be far worse. Brock Turner — a former Stanford University student who was convicted of raping an unconscious woman — was sentenced last week to only six months in prison. The judge was concerned, he said, for the student's future. A similar safeguard was attempted during the trial of Ethan Couch, the Texan dubbed the “affluenza teen" by lawyers who argued that he was too rich to understand the severity of killing four people while driving drunk. Concerns over the futures and affluence of young blacks rarely enter the judicial process. Turner will serve the same number of years probation for rape that Richards faces for essentially raising her voice during a protest.
The moral and ethical implications of laws in this country deserve scrutiny. But so do the biases and behaviors of those tasked with upholding them.
Shanelle Matthews is a communications strategist for Black Lives Matter.