Seven months after being dragged off a train, beaten by BART police, taken to Santa Rita and beaten again by guards, the Alameda County District Attorney decided to halt court proceedings against Nubia Bowe. She is (almost) free, and her two companions completely so.
Oct 17, 2014 THANK YOU DAN SIEGEL, ATTORNEY 4 THE PEOPLE for getting Nubia Bowe a deferred judgement at our October court date!
Charges for Levi and James were dropped. Nubia will have no ankle monitor, no time in jail, no probation.
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Read the original account:
Just Because You Weren't Dancing is No Reason for Us Not to Beat You Up and Then Throw You in Jail")
As I understand the terms, Nubia is tasked with not getting arrested for one year (whether from April, when she was charged, or the most recent court date in October, I am not sure), at which point everything will be dismissed.
This is a heartening turn-around from a few months ago when the District Attorney's office was demanding that Nubia do time in jail, despite the charges being a first offense. Nubia was prepared to go to trial rather than admit guilt and serve time.
The fact is that local police and the District Attorney have a long and sordid history of arresting young people of color on made up charges and holding them on absurdly high bail amounts, then trying to prosecute (and persecute) them on these trumped up offenses, turning into a nightmare for the accused.
Examples are myriad. In just the last few years Khali, a mentally ill homeless man, was arrested by Oakland Police for sitting on a bench with a blanket. Now he's serving multiple years in prison because he allegedly attacked a jail guard while waiting for his case to be heard. Tiffany Tran was arrested for "lynching" and threatened with felony prosecution.
The Ice Cream Three were arrested on totally bogus charges (robbery, hate crimes) which were finally dismissed. And Chris Moreland was held on $100,000 bail for shouting too loud in protest of Alan Blueford's murder.
Just days ago, the Trayvon 2, two young muslims who were the only ones arrested during the Trayvon Martin solidarity marches in Oakland last August, had their charges dropped after being dragged through months of court proceedings.
These are just some of the cases that are known about - because those attacked by the power of the state happened to have friends and comrades who followed their cases, wrote their stories and supported them.
But there are thousands of others in Alameda County, California and thereabouts who have been silently hauled away to Santa Rita, beaten and/or abused by guards, held on unattainable bail, then brought before a judge and essentially forced to plea bargain to a lesser charge. They are then injected into the criminal injustice system, guilty or not. Often denied services when the get out of jail or prison, an ofttimes future history of recidivism is predictable (California has the second highest recidivism rates in the country). Similar scenarios play out over much of the country.
It's the deaths of young men of color and the mentally ill at the hands of militarized police that get most of the attention. It is good that some serious attention is finally being paid, because this is of course not a new phenomenon. As the One Shot Away announcement of Nubia's case's disposition proclaims:
From Tyrone Guyton in 1973, Oscar Grant's friends in 2009, and Alan Blueford in 2012, the wholesale attack on our young people has to end.
That this attention comes at the insanity in Ferguson and other places these last few months is sickening, and such executions must end. Just let's not forget that that is but one aspect of a much larger cancer that devours more people per capita than any other nation on Earth, allowing sadistic individuals in uniforms to practice their power trips and pleasures with the (at least tacit) approval of the state, knowing they will never be called to justice.
So also an end to the school to prison pipeline; an end to the New Jim Crow; an end to debtors' prisons and their equivalents; an end to the institutionalization of solitary confinement; an end to "Stop & Frisk" ; and last, but surely to Nubia not least, an end to beating people for dancing - or not dancing - on - or off - public transportation.