Tag: Social Issues

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Why Thinking Lawyers Leave the Law

“Shortly after the article [in the New York Times, about murder convict Gary Gilmore] caught his eye, almost immediately in fact, Susskind’s old friend and associate Stanley Greenberg called, and they had a good conversation. Stanley had written a TV story fifteen years ago about a man awaiting execution. The man had been so long on Death Row that he changed in character, and the question became, “Who was being executed?” Metamorphosis the play had been called, and Susskind always felt that it had had some effect on the end of capital punishment in New York State, and maybe even a little to do with the Supreme Court decision that saved a lot of men’s lives on Death Row.”

From The Executioner’s Song, by Norman Mailer.

Intelligent lawyers leave the law because they know art produces social change, not legal arguments.

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Hearing On Police Accountability

On Monday, I attended a public Hearing held in lower Manhattan convened in the wake of the Sean Bell verdict, to address ways to increase police accountability. I wrote about what went on at the hearing for the Huffington Post

There was a pretty good turnout.

My favorite witness was Kamau Karl Franklin, a race justice fellow at the prestigious Center For Constitutional Rights here in NY. He had some very intriguing ideas for new legislation, which I wrote about here.

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More Thoughts on Sean Bell

Here’s a brief OpEd piece I wrote on the trial. Please feel free to comment on Huffington too if you wish 🙂 — if you can figure out how to log in… I can’t stop thinking about the case; there’s so much to say, so many different aspects from the legal issues at trial, to all of the individual people involved, to the larger social issues…

Here’s another perspective that focuses on the legal history of officer acquittals. On a not unrelated note, here’s an interesting article about race and the death penalty. Thanks to Capital Defense Weekly for both links.

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Enjoying well-needed glass of wine

Enjoying well-needed glass of wine

Originally uploaded by swan lake samba girl via mobile.


At Algonquin, between headache-inducing trial testimony from ‘suv guy’ & ny bar discussion on race & crim justice.

Update: So, that lecture on Race and Criminal Justice was really interesting, albeit short. It was given by the president of John Jay College of Criminal Justice. I’ll write more about it this weekend.

Fabio Coicou, the SUV guy whose testimony we’ve all been waiting for, was on today in the Sean Bell Shooting trial, and, as I said, it gave me a big headache. It was really confusing; it didn’t make complete sense to me, and he contradicted himself a lot — both within his testimony today, and between today’s testimony and his earlier Grand Jury testimony and statements he made to the investigating DAs shortly after the shooting.

I have to go to sleep because I’ve been working like nuts and have seriously got a total of about four hours of sleep since Sunday night, but in a nutshell Coicou really tried to downplay that there was any real confrontation between him and Sean Bell’s group outside the nightclub at all. Said he was waiting for his girlfriend, a dancer at the club, to come out, when Sean Bell went into the club. As he passed by, Coicou told him he had “bread in there,” (ie: money — his girlfriend — in the club) and that “alcohol was taking control of the situation.” When Bell emerged from the club, he approached Coicou, standing “chest to chest” with him, and told Coicou that he “was not letting alcohol take control.”

Bell and his friends then asked Coicou where he was from, Coicou said “Atlanta” but lived in Far Rockaway now. Guzman said he lived in a section of Far Rockaway as well and Coicou told him he may see him around and if he did, this SUV was his car. He backed toward the SUV and had his hands in his pockets but wasn’t scared. Bell and his friends left and Coicou decided he would drive around the block, then return to the club and wait for his girlfriend, which he did. He said he didn’t drive around the block because he was nervous or suspected the men were going to return and harm him, and claimed he never saw men peeking around the corner after the Bell group left. After a defense attorney read to him his Grand Jury testimony, Coicou admitted he did see men peeking around the corner but he wasn’t nervous and didn’t suspect anything. Later in cross examination he said he thought the men leaving might be a “diversion” so he drove around the corner.

After driving around the corner, he returned to the club and waited for his girlfriend. He never heard shots and wasn’t told about them until his girlfriend emerged from Kalua. He maintained he never heard anyone say “go get my gat” (gat being slang for gun), but according to the DA’s notes from Coicou’s meeting with them, he told them he heard those exact words before the men left. The DA stipulated that the notes were accurate.

Coicou’s personality was curious to me. On one hand, he kept fighting with the defense attorneys, saying things like “I’m not on trial here,” when counsel would ask him about his prior crimes or “I’m just trying to be like you,” in response to the question “Mr. Coicou, do you know what ‘diversion’ means or are you using words you don’t know?” On the other hand, he walked with his head down, shoulders hunched over, and seemed nervous. Throughout the testimony, there were a lot of harrumphs and snickers on the defense side of the courtroom, in contrast to comments like, “That’s right, you’re not on trial!” and knowing laughter from the prosecution side. I think the two sides had vastly different interpretations of the value of his testimony.

Anyway, I’ve gone on for far too long. I think both Coicou’s testimony and courtroom reactions to it were very interesting and I’ll write more about it this weekend. After … sleep!

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Are African American Women Mere "Footnotes"?

I am so sick of the way the media is making the Democratic race into a race and gender war and the terms they’re using to construct it falsely. All I heard all night was that Clinton won among “women” while Obama prevailed among “Blacks.” What exactly are Black women then — doesn’t this language kind of negate them? Just when my blood was boiling over it, the reporter added, “oh and a footnote, a footnote: Black women voted for Obama by …” (whatever the percentage was). “A footnote”? How insulting.

While I’m mostly pleased with the Super Tuesday results, I am thoroughly disgusted by the media coverage, at least on network TV. They act like Hillary’s a big loser for not doing better, when, hello, she secured the most delegates and won the biggest states. On the other hand, the way they talk about Obama, it’s as if they’re patting him on the head, saying ‘good boy, good boy, you did really well, considering…’ Considering what? That he’s Black? That he’s young? It’s like he’s a child or someone with some huge handicap.

And right now on ABC some male jackass pundit is saying the Democratic party needs to decide whether it wants to be forward-looking, appealing to young people aged 30 and under, or looking backward to the good old days, appealing to the 60 plus crowd. Could the party possibly be both, dumbass? Ugh. Idiots. Okay, I’m tired and going to bed…

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Bench Trial

Looks like we won’t be seeing what a jury of their peers decides after all. Always a bad idea to waive a jury trial, IMO, for anyone… Still, I’m going to be watching this case with great interest.

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I Believe in Queens

This post isn’t about dance, but one of my other deep interests: issues of criminal and social justice. There was a lot of talk here yesterday about the Appellate Court decision denying defense attorneys’ requests in the trial of Michael Oliver, Gescard Isnora, and Marc Cooper — police officers charged with the 2006 shooting death of African American man Sean Bell outside of a Queens strip club — to change the venue of the trial on grounds that publicity has made it impossible for the men to receive a fair trial in Queens. I think publicity about the case, though, is so widespread, it would be the same anywhere. I remember when I first heard about the shooting I was sitting in the reception area of a doctor’s office in North Carolina with my mom. The news came over the TV and the room became very quite; everyone just kind of regarded each other in silence. When I got back to my mom’s house, where I was spending Thanksgiving, I checked some of my favorite political blogs, like this one, based nowhere near New York, and which already had posts up about it. There’s been loads of publicity everywhere.

Many believe it was the re-location of the trial of officers who shot Amandou Diallo, from the Bronx to Albany, with a much whiter jury pool, that was responsible for the acquittal of those white detectives. Whether or not that’s true (and not all of the officers charged in the Bell shooting are white), Queens has one of the most ethnically diverse populations in the country, if not the world, being a burrough where many immigrants settle. That’s a lot of combined life experience. Juries in the outer borroughs are neither stupid nor careless; they rarely arrive at hasty verdicts, carefully examinining all evidence and taking time during deliberations, requesting numerous re-readings of charges and testimony. Often a verdict is mixed, with some charges on a single indictment resulting in acquittals, others determinations of guilt. You can tell the jury tried very hard to be fair and consider each charge separately.

I remember seeing an excellent Liz Garbus documentary called The Farm: Angola USA, about a high security prison in Louisiana. One inmate, a black man, was serving a 100-year sentence for raping two white women. The women both freely admitted they could not tell the difference between black people and couldn’t identify him as the rapist, but could state with assuredness that the rapist was black as was the man they identified in a lineup, the only one in handcuffs. There was no forensic evidence tying him to the crime (the film didn’t go into what evidence, if any, there was). The whole audience gasped; no one could believe he was convicted on that. I remember thinking, such a thing would never go down in Brooklyn, in Queens. That’s to say nothing about the various judges who preside over trials, but as for the juries of NYC, I believe in them.

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In Serious Praise of Cuba

Spent a lovely early evening at the New York City Ballet watching wonderful short film of Jock Soto‘s life (more on that soon!), then came home to watch the art of dance be totally and completely demeaned worse than I’ve ever seen by the insulting new TV show, Dance War. I’ve never in my life seen more people with less dance training seeking to become “stars.” They sang their hearts out and wiggled their butts and seemed in all honesty to have no clue that ass wiggling did not constitute dance. Some actually tried to do jumps but didn’t understand the concept of line (amongst many many other things) and so looked like monkeys.

But I’m more horrified that judges Bruno Tonioli and Carrie Ann Inaba (from Dancing With the Stars) actually praised them. Carrie Ann said of one woman who did a single fouette then stumbled on the very second whip around, that she had “technique.” A man did a grand battement (really fast high kick — anyone can do one) and Bruno jumped around onstage orgiastically screaming “excellent extension, did everyone see that extension?!” I’m not even going to bother criticizing this assininity; suffice it to say the judges know the fraud they’re perpetrating on the public. They know.

On one hand, I seriously feel like boycotting “Dancing With the Stars” unless they resign. On the other, I guess what can you do when you have a TV show and these are the applicants? You’ve gotta pick someone or the show’s off the air. And you can’t call everyone a bad dancer. So you shrug your shoulders and say, as Carrie Ann did, “Well, it’s easier to teach someone who can sing to dance than someone who can dance to sing.” Could anything be more of a smack in the face to a person who deeply respects dance?

And yet I’m very conflicted. I just can’t understand why people would try out for a show that necessitated the ability to dance when it’s obvious they’ve never had a single dance lesson in their lives. But I also don’t want to sound like the horrendously elitist critics and ballet dancers and afficionados I abhor who insist that in order to be a “real” dancer, one must have “proper training,” which, to them, just happens to include a very expensive education affordable only by the very rich, who are, in our lovely society, usually the very white. A friend and I were talking the other day about how wealthy many of the New York City Ballet dancers are (NOT the aforesaid Jock Soto, by the way).

So, I say, the only way out of this dilemma is to “buy” Cuban! There dance is highly respected as an art form, it is taught by some of the world’s greatest, and it’s also completely free. And free doesn’t exactly produce shoddy. And, if you don’t believe me, take Danny Tidwell’s word 🙂 More Jose’s, more, more!

Okay, it’s late and I’m tired and being a bit goofy all because I got so worked up I got over a stupid dance show… But, seriously, everyone please just watch this! Why oh why isn’t there more dance like it on TV?…