Equal justice?

As a youngster I played for a popular soccer club in my parish in Jamaica. (Shout out to Kirkvine FC) Some of our fans were...well... let's just say that they weren't exactly candidates for citizens of the year.

One such fan was riding me on his motorbike to play an opposing team when we were stopped by the local police. To make a long story short, my friend the soccer fan, was cuffed and brought to the police station where he got his ass kicked was "interrogated" by the local police. (Turns out it wasn't "his" motorcycle after all.) I, on the other hand, was much more fortunate. ''Yu a Doctor Bennett son, gwan bout yu business, and don't mek mi se u wid de likes of dis man u wit again. Him a bad business. Yu daddy is a good man. "

A few weeks later I saw the guy and asked him what happened. Sure enough, he said they took him to the police station and kicked his ass before letting him go. I told him I was sorry, but he said in no uncertain terms not to worry about it. "Yu a Doctor Bennett son, mi know se dem can't bodda yu."

That was privilege working for me, so I am not naïve when it comes to understanding the dynamics of an individual getting breaks because of his wealth, status, or connections. Still, it doesn't make it right. These were some local cops throwing me a break because they knew who my dad was. And the truly sad thing about this little anecdote is that, looking back at it, the victim of the injustice knew it as well, and he was cool with it.    

Fast forward to the United States, 2016. We all know the story by now of the kid from Stanford, who, inexcusably, was given six months for raping and violating a woman. SIX MONTHS!!

The prosecution asked for six years, but the Judge did not want to ruin the young man's life, and he did not think that he would be a "danger to others." He had too much going for him: wealth, connections, skin color.... you get the picture. They didn't even release his mug shot until there was outrage on social media and other areas over the subject.

But this was not a police officer giving the kid a break; this was a Judge. A Judge who would have no doubt thrown a poor black, brown, or white kid in jail for at least six years. This is like the "affluenza kid making his wealth work for him in the justice system, and everyone is sickened by it.  

Don't think that people in society don't see these types of cases of injustice playing themselves out every day across the country. And unlike my friend with the stolen motorbike, they don't understand the reason for it, and they won't accept that this is just the way it is.

Will Bunch, writing for Philly.com,  wrote eloquently about the subject.

"But the problem here -- and it's a huge problem -- is that the "war on political correctness" is largely just an excuse for Trump's mostly white, heavily male group of supporters to dismiss any grievance -- no matter how legitimate -- by women, by the LGBT community, by racial and religious minority groups, as just liberal "white noise." That assumes some kind of fictional, magical world where all serious social inequity was pretty much wiped off the earth in black-and-white footage of the 1960s, so that's all that remains in their book is  left-wing rebels without a legitimate cause.

And yet nearly every day, even if you're not looking for it, a story of rank injustice and unfairness in today's America will all but smack you in the face. Sometimes, they cross over into the broader national dialogue, as happened this week with the shockingly light sentence meted out to Brock Turner, 20, a now convicted rapist who happened to have been a star swimmer at an elite university, Stanford.

Turner was caught in the act, raping a drunk and unconscious woman near a trash dumpster after a party on the Northern California campus, and chased down by two heroic strangers. Turner's defense that the woman somehow consented, despite her lack of consciousness, was rejected, yet the judge in the case, Aaron Persky, meted out a lighter sentence than one could possibly imagine (the law allowed for up to 14 years). The young man got six months (but probably just three) behind bars -- to be served now in a prison but a county jail -- and three years probabtion. Said Persky, himself a former Stanford athlete: "A prison sentence would have a severe impact on him (Turner)."

But what's truly shocking is that Persky (who now faces a recall drive, and rightfully so) meted out this light wrist slap after listening to the victim, 23, read an unbelievably moving 7,000-word statement about the severe impact on her. It was both a gut-wrenching account of the soul-crushing aftermath of sexual assault and a bitter, stinging indictment of America's sick rape culture...

Turner -- yeah, sure, he lost some stuff like his scholarship, but he will still basically be free to get on with the rest of his life before the first autumn leaf hits the ground. This woman lost a piece of her soul that she will not get back -- not in three months, not in three years, not ever. Of course, maybe Turner's swimming times did matter in the end. Maybe that's why he received a sentence that almost certainly would not have been in the cards had he been almost anyone else.

Indeed, the columnist Shaun King noted that a 19-year-old star football player at Vanderbilt -- also an elite private university -- named Cory Batey was similarly caught, amid overwhelming evidence, of sexually assaulting a woman, tried and, like Turner, convicted on multiple felony counts. Unlike Turner, Batey was sentenced to the mandatory minimum of 15 to 25 years in prison.

Maybe it's because it was Tennessee..or just maybe Batey didn't get the same break because he is black." [ More]

*Pic from Santa Clara County sheriff's office.