in this New York Times column, Nicholas Kristof introduces his readers to Ian Manuel.
On the surface, some might argue we should not care about Ian Manuel. At the instigation of gang members and as part of an initiation into that gang, he fired at a woman, with one bullet entering her jaw, smashing it and knocking out five teeth and damaging her gum.
He is black. She is white, and at the time was a stay-at-home mom out with some friends.
He was originally sentenced to life without parole, but as a result of a Supreme Court opinion that sentence was later changed to 65 years.
Why was his sentence changed? Because when Ian Manuel shot Debbie Baigrie, he was just 13 years old.
Kristof remind us
Manuel fired the bullet when he was barely 13, and he fit all too neatly into racial stereotypes, especially that of the black predator who had to be locked away forever.
Kristof writes
Although he had just turned 13, prosecutors charged him as an adult, and the judge sentenced him to life without the possibility of parole. Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative, the lawyer now representing him, says that every single child 13 or 14 years old sentenced to life without parole for a nonhomicide has been a person of color.
Yesterday I wrote about a book written by his current lawyer, Bryan Stevenson, in a post titled
... and secure the Blessings of Liberty..., in which I explored some of the data Stevenson, best-known for winning the release of Walter McMillian, condemned to death by Alabama for a crime he clearly had not committed. His 8th chapter begins with a poem by Ian Manuel, and discusses his case and his imprisonment. One sentence in that chapter jumped out at me. On p. 153 I read
Ian spent 18 years in uninterrupted solitary confinement.
What makes this case unusual is that Manuel reached out to Baigrie early in his confinement, and over the years since she has become one of his strongest advocates.
Please keep reading.
Kristof will provide some of the background of Manuel before the day he shot Baigrie:
Manuel grew up in a housing project here in Tampa to a mom with drug problems, without a dad at home, and he drifted early to crime. By the time he was 13, he had had 16 arrests. He desperately needed help, but instead the authorities kept returning him to a dysfunctional home.
Some might argue that many come from dysfunctional homes without themselves becoming violent. That is true, but does that entitle us to ignore the impact it has upon those who must live through it?
Remember the notion of "black predator" and ask yourself if we so easily apply the term "predator" to equivalent children who are blonde, blue-eyed, and White, even if their crimes equal or exceed that of Ian Manuel.
Remember that Manuel spent longer in solitary confinement than the years he had been alive at the time he shot Baigrie. As you might imagine,his prison record was not sparkling, and yet, remember his age. Kristof writes
Manuel, now 37, did not adjust well to prison, and his prison disciplinary record covers four pages of single-spaced entries. He was placed in solitary confinement at age 15 and remained there almost continually until he was 33. For a time, he cut himself to relieve the numbness. He repeatedly attempted suicide.
In the last few years, since being returned to the general population he has thrived, demonstrated an intelligence that is undeniable, and more.
I want to explore two more paragraphs from Kristof's superb column, which I urge you to read in its entirety. First this:
Race in America is a dispiriting topic, a prism to confirm our own biases. Some will emphasize the unarguable brutality of Manuel’s crime, while others, myself included, will focus on the harshness of a sentence that probably would not have been given to a white 13-year-old. In other columns, I’ve focused on racism that holds back perfectly innocent people because of their skin color; those are the easiest cases, while Ian is a reminder that racial injustice also affects those who made horrific mistakes or committed brutal crimes. It’s still injustice.
We need to examine our national conscience. First, I remind people that the purpose of the Bill of Rights is to protect ALL of us against the power of the state by guaranteeing among other things the full protections of due process even for those who are clearly guilty. In many of the cases Stevenson describes in his powerful book, those wrongfully convicted were not only denied due process, but had their rights abused by suborned perjury, denial of access to exculpatory evidence, and even when released blocked from compensation for their wrongful imprisonment by laws and Court decisions that afford too much protection to law enforcement and prosecution even when they are clearly abusive of the rights of the wrongfully accused.
That does not apply to Ian Manuel. He clearly committed the crime for which he is being punished.
And yet, he was only 13 at the time, and far from being totally responsible for his actions, in part because what we had a society allowed to happen to him.
In theory the reason for a separate juvenile justice system is supposed to be that we acknowledge that young people cannot be held totally responsible for their actions because they lack maturity and judgment. It seems contradictory to deny them some rights of adults in in ordinary life only to decide we will hold them accountable as adults when certain crimes are committed. It is of course as contradictory as the notion we will allow corporations to be persons when they want to distort our politics and government and yet not hold them to the same standard we do humans for responsibility for harmful actions. It is of a piece of the many occasions when we ignore the 14th Amendment requirement that governments not deny the equal protection of the law to any person, a provision originally applied against the states of the Confederacy and in Bolling v Sharpe, a case decided in conjunction with Brown v Board, applied against the Federal government as well as the states. It is ironic although perhaps not surprising that so many of the cases in which we find such violations as described by Bryan Stevenson we are dealing with the same states against whom the 14th Amendment was written to be applied. That includes Ian Manuel, because this case is from Tampa Florida.
And if I may, writing of Florida, I would like again to quote one paragraph from the book, which also appeared in my diary yesterday, from page 152:
By 2010, Florida had sentenced more than a hundred children to life imprisonment without parole for non-homicide offenses, several of whom were thirteen years old at the time of the crime. All of youngest condemned children - thirteen or fourteen years of age - were black or Latino. Florida had the largest population in the world of children condemned to die in prison for non-homicides.
Some will argue that legally it does not matter that Baigrie did not die - one can be executed for an attempted homicide. Except that the Supreme Court not only banned execution of those who committed otherwise capital crimes when younger than 18, it also banned life without parole. Even a Court as conservative as the current Supreme Court seems to have a majority that recognizes a different standard of punishment for the young who commit crimes.
We have a responsibility to consider how our society helps create this problem. Thus I offer the following paragraph from Kristof:
There’s a tragic symmetry here. We as a society failed Manuel early on, and he, in turn, failed us. When you can predict that an infant boy of color in a particular ZIP code is more likely to go to prison than to college, it’s our fault more than his. The losers aren’t just those kids but also crime victims like Baigrie — and, in a larger sense, all of us. Manuel never had a chance to contribute to society and is costing us $47.50 each day he is in prison. That’s a waste of money, of human talent, of life itself.
IF our only concern is that we must punish crimes, then let us at least be consistent. Insist upon punishment for torture. Insist upon punishment for police who violate the rights of others, even if only because they are poorly trained and/or supervised, or because they operate more out of what they claim as a justifiable fear (thus attempting to rationalize shooting a 12 year old is less than two seconds after exiting a patrol car). Insist upon punishment of those whose reckless actions destroyed the financial security of millions and put the economy not merely of this nation but of the entire world in serious jeopardy.
After all, the 14th Amendment does require Equal Protection for ALL persons.
Far better would be rather than merely punishing after the fact, even were there no racism involved in the disparities of sentencing, is to accept our responsibility for minimizing the situations that contribute mightily to a 13 year old of obvious intelligence already being so disconnected from the larger society that he willingly attempts to kill a woman as a part of a gang initiation.
We as a nation and a society are exceptional in our continuing obtuseness on matters of race and economic disparity and our insistence upon the harshest approach to punishment which inevitably falls most heavily on the poor, especially poor people of color.
Some claim we are a Christian nation. The response to them about matters of crime and punishment is too often that they are relying upon the notion from the Hebrew Bible of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Sentencing to death a person who commits a crime which has not resulted in a death violates that precept, which in its original intent did not mean a person who knocked out your tooth lost one of his own - it was a limit to punishment not to be excessive, but it was also expressed as understood by the rabbis who applied it to be an expression of the monetary compensation to which the injured party was entitled.
And even on monetary compensation, what do we owe to those we have wrongfully convicted and imprisoned? Read my post yesterday for more on that topic.
No one is arguing that Ian Manuel should not have been convicted and sentenced. He did attempt to take the life of Debbie Baigrie.
But what punishment is appropriate?
Is our criminal justice system only supposed to punish, never seek to rehabilitate?
What is the cost to our society, both in terms of the loss of productivity of those we incarcerate and yes, even execute, and also in the coarsening of our own souls?
What about the fact that we still have a criminal justice system that falls disproportionally on those of color.
What about the fact that those who are poor suffer more in criminal justice?
What about the double burden of being poor and black, denied access to the things in life that can make a difference earlier in life, then punished more severely because of the predicable results that for some result in greater and disproportionate punishment, less chance of rehabilitation and being returned to society as a productive and contributing member?
Why is it that our American Exceptionalism is at least among the supposedly developed democracy the one with the greatest economic inequality and the greatest number and percentage of incarcerated? What does it say that as we approach a century and a half since we abolished chattel slavery except as punishment for a crime we have taken that supposed exception to rapidly increase those we incarcerate, in some cases to use a slave labor, although in the case of Ian Manuel and his 18 years of solitary confinement we did not even gain that?
What does it say about us as a nation?
Are we willing to confront our flaws honestly, or do we avert our eyes and move on to other topics?
What say you?