Briittany Martin illustration courtesy Breaking the Chains, org
After the May 2020 killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, millions of Black and white Americans took to the streets across the U.S. in mostly peaceful protests.
During one such protest, in Sumter, S.C., a small group of demonstrators shouting “No Justice, No Peace,” confronted local police. One of the speakers addressed the officers in bitter terms.
“Y’all want war, y’all got it,” she said in comments reported bv NPR. “We ready to die for this. You better be ready to die for the blue. I’m ready to die for the Black.”
The speaker at that June 2020 protest was Brittany Martin, a mother of four who had moved to Sumter earlier in the spring. Known as a “radical” political activist, Martin was already enraged over the death of her brother-in-law, who had been shot by police in 2016 in a volley of 19 bullets.
Martin was among nine people arrested after the demonstration, but her violent rhetoric earned her special attention from law enforcement.
She was charged with five counts of threatening the life of a public official and with instigating, aiding or participating in a riot.
The protest was peaceful. No one was injured or killed; nor was any property damaged. On May 19, 2022, a jury recognized that, by acquitting Martin on the inciting-a-riot charge and effectively dismissed the other changes..
But instead, she was found guilty of a new charge that apparently doesn’t even exist in South Carolina legal codes: a breach of peace of a “high and aggravated nature.”
A breach of peace charge in Sumter normally carries a $500 fine and 30 days in jail. Martin, who was several months pregnant, was sentenced to four years in prison.
Let’s call that protest justice.
This is insurrection justice.
On Jan. 6, 2021, more than 2,000 white supremacists, racist militia, and their supporters stormed the nation’s Capitol. Their stated intent, expressed in collective chants, was to hang the Vice-President of the United States, kill the Speaker of the House, and do bodily harm to Democratic members of Congress.
On Sept. 6, 2022, the Insider reported that at least 910 people have been criminally charged thus far for their roles in what amounted to an attempt to stage a coup—an insurrection meant to overturn the results of the federal election and keep Donald Trump in the White House.
According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia website, at least 98 of those charged are women.
As of Sept. 12, 2022, 30 of these women have reached the following plea deals with the government:
-
- 15 received periods of incarceration, either in jail or low level penal facility, ranging from 14 days to 90 days;
- 12 received probation ranging from 60 days to five years;
- Two received home detention—one for 30 days, the other for 90 days; and .
- One received a fine of $3,000.
All of these women are white. Some are self-identified supporters of white supremacist groups or extremist militia.
The contrast with the treatment of Brittany Martin couldn’t be clearer.
If you are a radical Black woman who gets in the face of police officers by shouting some unpleasant words during a peaceful protest, you will get a four-year prison sentence.
If, on the other hand, you are a white woman who storms into the nation’s Capitol shouting “hang Mike Pence” and “kill Nancy Pelosi” during a violent protest, you can expect a fine, maybe, or perhaps several weeks of home confinement with television privileges—or you may be placed on probation for a couple years.
At the very worst, you may have to serve 90 days in jail.
The contrast in sentencing won’t surprise anyone who has examined the racial disparities in U.S. justice. According to the National Black Women’s Justice Institute, Black women are arrested and prosecuted at higher rates than white women; sentenced more severely than white women; and incarcerated more often than white women.
But the differences in punishment for Americans exercising their lawful right to free speech and assembly are especially worrying.
Brittany Martin’s rhetoric may have been disturbing—just as much so as the rhetoric used by the mob at the Capitol. But it did not result in the assault of any police officer, nor of anyone else for that matter.
Five people died during the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, with one being shot by a Capitol Police officer, after a rally led by President Trump and his supporters that inflamed the crowd and urged them to stop Congress members from certifying the electoral vote count.
The special committee investigating the Jan 6 events is weighing whether some of the rhetoric used at the rally constituted an incitement to riot. Approximately 140 police officers were injured protecting the Capitol—some so severely they were forced to retire, and are receiving mental health counseling.
The insurrectionists caused $1.5 million in damage to the Capitol.
Billly Sinclair
Yet Martin received a sentence that is 45 months more than the longest period of incarceration (90 days) given to a white female insurrectionist.
What happened to equal justice?
Billy Sinclair spent 40 years in the Louisiana prison system, six of which were on death row. He is a published author, an award-winning journalist (a George Polk Award recipient), and the co-host of the criminal justice podcast, “Justice Delayed.”
from The Crime Report https://ift.tt/UdgfPSH
via IFTTT