Writing for Justice

A blog of the Knox County Public Defender's Community Law Office

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Inside the Trial of Dylann Roof

The complicated moral calculations that followed a horrific crime.

“The immensity of the pain that Roof has inflicted upon Charleston is not contained by geography. It conforms perfectly to the contours of the nation that produced him.”--Jelani Cobb

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Order In The Classroom: From Hall Monitors To Handcuffs - 1A

Are we criminalizing normal childhood behavior? A video posted on Twitter this week shows a female student being slammed to the ground by a school resource officer in Wake County, N.C. The footage has drawn renewed attention to the presence of police in schools and the treatment of kids at the hands of those officers.

#SchooltoPrisonPipeline

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To all of the CLO staff & community members who donate your time, talents and resources during this holiday season--and throughout the year-- thank you!

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From our screening and discussion of 13th last night, Assistant Public Defender Julie Gautreau weighs in on labeling people as “criminals” and the work required to overcome our biased notions of who “criminals” are.

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#mannequinchallenge #Zone-style

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Have you ever whipped cream by hand? It’s not that easy! Our #Zone kids rocked it last week with Chef Tyler White. Check it out here.

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Busted: America's Poverty Myths | WNYC

On the Media’s series on poverty is grounded in the Talmudic notion that “We do not see things as they are. We see things as we are.” Brooke Gladstone traveled to Ohio to learn from people living the varied reality of poverty today, and to unpack the myths that shape our private presumptions as well as our policy decisions. In each episode, we feature the voices and complex stories of individuals, as well essential context from scholars, to lay open the tales we tell ourselves.

If you want to understand more about the people we serve at the CLO, this indispensable series from On the Media is a good place to start. Our clients span many demographics, but they all have at least one thing in common: poverty. Take the time to listen to this series. We guarantee that there is a lot you don’t know about work and poverty, policy and benefits, and what it means to live on the margins in Appalachia and beyond. 

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Courtesy of @NatJuvDefend (njdc.info)

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At one of the toughest prisons in America, doubling up inmates in cells designed for solitary confinement can lead to violence, and for some who refuse a cellmate could be placed in handcuffs and chains.

Inside Lewisburg Prison: A Choice Between A Violent Cellmate Or Shackles

Illustration: Angie Wang for NPR

Editor’s note: This story was reported and published in partnership between NPR News Investigations and The Marshall Project.

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The Daily Toll Gun Violence Takes On America's Youth - The Diane Rehm Show

On an average day in the United States, seven young people are shot to death. A British journalist chooses a random day in 2013 and profiles each of the lives cut short.

Journalist Gary Younge’s new book is called Another Day in the Death of America. Go get it.

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Society's Parasite: A Look Inside The Treatment Industrial Complex or "T...

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A Community Action to create equity in education.

Join Stop School Push-Out for an open house, Thursday, 10/20, 6-8pm, Mounty Calvary Baptist Church, 1807 Dandridge Ave, Knoxville, 37915.

@sppknox

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The Moth | The Art and Craft of Storytelling

The Moth is an acclaimed not-for-profit organization dedicated to the art & craft of storytelling. It has presented true & first person stories worldwide.

Listen to Hector Black’s astonishing story of radical forgiveness after the rape and murder of his daughter. 

“I think forgiveness is possible for the worst, and I do believe we all need forgiveness, God knows.”

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“Every 25 seconds in the United States, someone is arrested for the simple act of possessing drugs for their personal use, just as Neal and Nicole were. Around the country, police make more arrests for drug possession than for any other crime. More than one of every nine arrests by state law enforcement is for drug possession, amounting to more than 1.25 million arrests each year. And despite officials’ claims that drug laws are meant to curb drug sales, four times as many people are arrested for possessing drugs as are arrested for selling them.” from Every 25 Seconds: The Human Toll of Criminalizing Drug Use in the United States, a new report from @humanrightswatch and #ACLU

(via Every 25 Seconds )

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Terror Lynching in America

Our history of racial terror casts a shadow across the U.S. landscape. We must engage it more honestly.

More extraordinary work from EJI and artist Molly Crabapple. You cannot look away.

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Ransom the Captive: May and Neveah

An occasional series by Julie Gautreau

“I was in prison, and you came to me”—Gospel of St. Matthew 25:36

There was a young woman from a remote East Tennessee county who had been traveling through Knoxville with her boyfriend. She was a passenger in his car. He was a low-level methamphetamine dealer – more like a peddler, doling out enough to satisfy his dealer into letting him keep a gram or so for himself and his girlfriend, whom I will call May. They got caught–not dealing, just being in the car with the meth in it. The car happened to be within 1000 feet of a public park, although they didn’t know that and had just been looking for somebody. But the Tennessee Legislature has codified that distance as a reason for more severe punishment for people who get caught with drugs inside a 1000-foot radius of a park, or school, or daycare center.

May was barely inside her twenties, had never graduated from high school, and had grown up in abject poverty. She had the spectral look of a meth addict, and the defeated, listless affect of a war refugee. When May was arrested, she was six months pregnant with her first baby.

Pregnant drug addicts present a real conflict for people in the justice system. Judges and prosecutors think primarily about protecting the baby from continued substance abuse. I understand that. I didn’t want May’s baby to be born a drug addict, or with drug-induced deformities. But I also didn’t want May’s baby to be born in jail. And neither did May. She hoped to get clean and be a good mom. I’m the person who has a duty to believe her when she makes that promise.

Pregnancy or no pregnancy, the bond for a “zone” case – a drug case within that 1000-foot radius – is always high, especially if the drug is methamphetamine. There was no way on heaven or earth, or in hell, that May would have ever been able to make bond. Even the more predatory bonding companies would hesitate to write out a poor addict from outside Knox County. But none of that even mattered. Her home county, where May was on probation for a misdemeanor, issued a probation violation warrant and placed a hold on her. Even if she’d been able to afford bond, she would have been transported to that county’s jail.

With no other alternatives, May begged for as a quick a plea deal as I could manage. She was terrified of having her baby in jail, afraid the baby would be taken away from her forever. She had plans to break free of her bad relationship, to get clean, start a new life. She saw her baby as a gift from God to steer her in a new direction. She might have been naïve about how easy that would be for her, but she really believed it.

Here’s some legal calculus for you: Poor + Addicted + Pregnant + Prior Conviction = Zero Leverage. May’s luck – not that she ever had any – also turned up one of the most inflexible prosecutors in the county. I don’t remember what sort of deal she got, as good an indication as any that it wasn’t much of one. She got some kind of probation, but not in time for it to matter.

I got a call from a preacher one day asking me if a furlough could be arranged for May. Now in her eighth month of pregnancy and still in jail, she had gone into labor. She had lost the baby. The preacher was the pastor of a Baptist church not far from the Detention Facility. He often ministered to inmates there. He had helped May cope with her fear and loneliness by counseling her. Now he was trying to help her bury her baby.

I was not sure she could get a furlough because of that hold from another county. After talking to a few people up the chain of command at the DF, I drafted an order directing a deputy to take her to the graveyard of that country Baptist church, a couple miles from the DF, where the preacher had arranged for a burial. She would be shackled and handcuffed in addition to being escorted. That was official policy. The preacher’s plan was to hold a burial service for May’s baby, whom she had named Neveah (the baby’s real name, heaven spelled backwards). I ran the furlough order through the gauntlet of signatures and approvals, filed it, and a clerk faxed a copy to the DF.

I remember noticing the weather outside as I drove back to my office, because I imagined what that burial scene must be like on such a cold day, one of those bleak gray East Tennessee days that slog from late winter to the brink of spring. The wind in that part of Knox County near the DF seems more active than anywhere else, more blustery, weightier. The ground is hard and colorless.

Neveah had a little funeral that day. Her mother was not present. That county hold was the reason given by some administrator in the chain who stopped the furlough. May had been transported to the hospital for her baby’s premature delivery, hours after she had started bleeding. They got her to the ER in time for the stillbirth. The county hold hadn’t stopped that, of course, emergency and all.

If there is any hero in this story, it is that preacher who did make it to the burial that he had arranged, who carried out his promise, who saw the humanity in May and counseled her until the day the other county finally came to pick her up. I do not know what became of her. I do not know if Neveah’s grave is even marked.

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Liberal Redneck Comedy Team Takes Its Message to the Masses With National Tour and New Book - The Knoxville Mercury

Skew! The Liberal Redneck comedy trend born right here in Knoxville just ain’t a joke any more. The East Tennessee comedy crew of Trae Crowder, Drew Morgan, and Corey Forrester ...

We’re darned proud of former Knox County Assistant Public Defender Drew Morgan and the rest of the Liberal Redneck crew. We’re certain that these three guys are onto something big (and important)! As they write in the introduction to their new book, The Liberal Redneck Manifesto: Draggin Dixie out of the Dark: “We’re going to drag our homeland kicking and screaming into the present, whether the prideful mouth breathers or the naysaying outsiders like it or not.” That sounds exactly right to us.