Wanted to write about something that was really bothering me this week and I wasn’t sure which angle to attack it from. But since this is my blog, and I set the rules, I’m going with both.
There are two things that people know know about about my academic career. 1) I raise my hand a lot, usually from the front row of class and 2) Criminal Law means a lot to me. As far as the first one, I really put a lot of thought into what I say when I raise my hand. When people speak in class, especially when its an opinion/policy based question it should add to the discussion. I try not to raise my hand just to hear myself talk, and I try not to be “that guy”. Whether it’s been successful or not is up for debate, but I did get an award for “contributing to the classroom learning experience” so there’s a 51 percent chance I haven’t upset more people than not.
The other part is Criminal Law. I tell people often that when it comes to class, if there aren’t any murders I get bored. My degree is in Criminal Justice. I’ve interned in criminal justice fields a decent portion of the last few years. I’m very passionate about the way police officers interact with people, the way laws are set up, and how judges decide cases. Criminal Law and its history is also tied closely with discrimination, especially racial discrimination.
The problem with my passion for criminal law and being prone towards raising my hand a lot, is that sometimes I feel like I go too far. While some people in my criminal law class last year cared about legal realism and the disconnect between what laws say and how they are carried out, a lot of my classmates just wanted to do well on the final. Not a problem, because that’s the way I felt in Property and other classes. But it also means that when I’m going on about some story about my connections to criminal justice and hypothetical questions that are “loosely related” to things that I’ve seen in my neighborhood, I’m not doing anything to “contribute to the classroom learning experience”. Rather, I’m detracting from it.
This years Criminal Procedure class has been absolutely atrocious for me. There was a case we read that essentially detailed a racial profiling stop.
**Parentheses in the following paragraph are not the facts given by the Supreme Court, but my opinion of what actually happened, legal realism**
In Whren, a set of police officers conduct a search based on a stop due to a traffic violation. The details of the stop were painful for me to read as someone who grew up in New York City and especially during my college years had to listen to a lot of BS rationales for stops that essentially boiled down to “they were Black/Hispanic and I figured they might be a criminal.” The officers were part of a drug unit. They were in a high drug neighborhood (read: poor/minority I’ve never heard “The Hill” described as a high drug neighborhood although I’m certain there pretty easy access to drugs, but I digress) and they began to follow the suspect because he was stopped at a stop sign for too long (while being black).
Now to some people the ends justify the means in criminal law cases. Was the person guilty of a crime or not? If that is your view of things, then there is no discussion to be had. When the police officers caught up to Whren, he had two bags of vials of crack cocaine in his hands. But this is a criminal procedure class, so the question “did the police make a proper stop/search” is the only important one. The court decided that even though the police officers were a drug unit, and that the stop was a traffic violation bearing no relationship to carrying drugs, the stop was acceptable. This is a classic racial profiling stop, one that bothers me deeply and one that happens all over America. I’ve never understood when my classmates get upset about the absence or presence of a dissent in a case, but when I realized there was no dissent in the textbook, and then looked it up online to realize that it was a 9-0 decision, I felt a blood vessel pop in my forehead.
When the case came up in class, I made the conscious decision to say nothing and just listen to my classmates. Unfortunately, in the middle of discussing the case, the professor gave a hypo which I thought was borderline insulting. Essentially, she gave a hypo about another racial profiling case, and made it clear that the cops were essentially racially profiling. Fine. Then, she asked how Whren changed things. The problem is the assumption that Whren actually did change anything. De facto, Whren made racial profiling an acceptable practice as long as you don’t admit you’re racially profiling, even when it’s painfully obvious that you are. But police were doing that long before Whren, and police do it to this day. Rather than a well thought out response to the hypo, my answer was… “Is the case in Texas? Are the suspects black? Then why are we pretending the law matters?” Upon realizing I was absolutely being “that guy” and fighting the hypo (and being borderline rude) I gave a quick, mumbled version of the answer i figured she wanted (Before Whren you could make the argument that the stop was improper, but now you can’t).
There’s also another problem with that answer. Because race is a sensitive topic, it stifles the conversation about the case. When one person describes the police, judges and DA’s as racist (or perpetuating racism) in one fell swoop, it creates unease if you agree with the stop, even if it’s a perfectly reasonable argument (Something along the lines of “The people were violating a traffic law, so the police ought to be able to stop them and at least perform a cursory check if they’re breaking other laws, regardless of race”). The next day’s class discussed a situation where a police officer fatally shot a person who was evading arrest for stealing $10. The case has a meaningful racial aspect to it, but since the text book didn’t mention the suspect’s race (Take a wild guess), and it’s not like 1974 Memphis (where the incident took place) had a recent history of racism, I didn’t want to be that guy and mention it. Especially since every other case has racial overtones, and there’s only so much righteous indignation to go around.
I have a feeling that Crim Pro is going to be tough sledding. Property was rough because I didn’t care at all about the subject. Crim Pro is going to be difficult because I care deeply, but not in a way that will be fruitful when the final comes around. It also doesn’t help when I’m listening to 911 tapes at work and hear the operator ask “Was [the suspect] Black, Hispanic or Asian” in a county where 90 percent of people are none of the above. I’ll try to save my righteous indignation for another outlet.
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