Ramarley Graham and the wailing cry of injustice
OPINION - The sound of a mother’s wailing cry is an alert that a great injustice has occurred. I have experienced that cry many times throughout my career in the social justice movement...
The sound of a mother’s wailing cry is an alert that a great injustice has occurred. I have experienced that cry many times throughout my career in the social justice movement.
The very first time I truly experienced it was in 1984 while organizing in Jackson, Mississippi. I was out in a supermarket area handing out leaflets when a store manager came to me to tell me I was wanted on the phone. My initial reaction was that the owners of the store were going to advise me that if I didn’t leave the premises or stop leafleting I would be arrested.
When I got to the phone it was something much worse; it was the wailing cry of a woman, whose sound was unmistakable to me. It was my mother; who had just been informed that her daughter, her eldest child and best friend at the time, had been murdered by a stalker who the police had refused to arrest. So it was this week when I was on the phone with organizers and heard a woman’s wailing cry in the background.
This time it was Constance Malcolm, the mother of Ramarley Graham, an 18-year-old black teenager who was unarmed and in his own home when he was shot and killed by a New York City Police Officer. The wailing cry of Constance was yet another alert that a great injustice had occurred.
On February 2, 2012 Ramarley Graham was on his way home in the Bronx when he somehow became identified by NYPD Street Narcotics Team as a possible drug suspect who was also armed with a gun. The world would soon learn, that combination of description means death for young black men.
The officers followed Graham to his home and without a warrant, probable cause or an exigent circumstance they entered his home and found him in the bathroom with the door closed. His grandmother and six-year-old brother were both present and she was asking what was going on.
Suddenly there was the sound of gun fire and Ramarley Graham lay dead from a gunshot from police officer Richard Haste.
What happened and why no one knew immediately, but many, including Ramarley’s parents, had hoped to find out because Officer Richard Haste would have to stand trial as he was indicted by a Bronx Grand Jury for manslaughter.
This past week, Constance Malcolm exploded in the Bronx Courtroom of Justice Steven Barrett when he dismissed the indictment as defective based upon an instruction given to the Grand Jury by the prosecutors.
Once again, a mother and father of a young black man in urban America are wondering whether this is justice denied.
They have good cause to be concerned. Justice is hard to come by for black and Latino families, particularly when a police officer is on the other side of the equation. Anyone who has ever watched a TV police drama or sat in a real courtroom have heard many a judge instruct the jury that the indictment is not evidence of any guilt. That decision is left to jurors who are chosen from the county of the incident and are commonly referred to as the peers of the accused. Grand jurors are instructed that they are not there to determine guilt or innocence just whether there is probable cause or sufficient evidence to charge the accused with the crime presented.
More significantly, since grand jury proceedings are secret, the only persons with complete access to what has occurred in the grand jury are the prosecutors and the judges who may come to preside over the case. Prosecutors are held to a very high standard of fairness with regard to their presentations to the grand jury because they have the obligation to ensure that the charging process maintains the integrity of a fair and impartial presentation of the evidence. Judges also have an obligation to not thwart justice with a selective or biased reading of what may have occurred during any grand jury presentation.
In the grand jury as it relates to Officer Richard Haste, Judge Barrett ruled that the prosecutors had improperly left the impression that the grand jurors shouldn’t consider evidence that other officers had radioed Officer Haste that Ramarley Graham had a gun. A ruling that shocked the courtroom as it struck at the soul of justice.
For the court, this improper impression had to do with one word, “control.” The documents associated with the case reveal that the grand jurors heard the testimony of the officers working with Haste including their testimony that they had observed Graham with a gun and that they communicated that fact to Officer Haste. Haste testified that throughout his encounter with Graham, both before and after entering the home, he believed that Graham was armed with a gun based upon the communications from his fellow officers that Graham had a gun. The prosecutors then gave a final instruction to the grand jury saying, “It is not the reasonableness of the beliefs of other police officers that was communicated to Haste that ‘controls’ the issue of justification. It is the reasonableness of Haste’s conduct at the time of the shooting. That is the issue [that] controls the issue of justification.” With that, Judge Barrett declared in essence that the grand jury lacked integrity, the indictment was therefore defective and must be dismissed.
Aristotle is quoted as having said “the virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.” They who will continue to ignore the great cause of justice and a mother’s cry for what is right, lack the wisdom to ensure equal justice for all.
Michael A. Hardy, Esq. is General Counsel and Executive Vice-President to National Action Network (NAN). He has been involved in many of this nation’s highest profiled cases involving violations of civil or human rights. He continues to supervise National Action Network’s crisis unit and hosts a monthly free legal clinic at NAN New York City’s House of Justice.
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