Scores of defense attorneys in New York City and elsewhere protested the criminal justice system’s handling of police killings of unarmed black men by participating in marches and die-ins Wednesday.
In Brooklyn, public defenders and other lawyers marched at courthouses and a prosecutor’s office and staged a die-in outside a city jail. They later stood in front of a criminal court, chanting, “Black lives matter” and “I can’t breathe,” a reference to the last words of Eric Garner, a 43-year-old Staten Island resident who was killed in July.
In Philadelphia, a group of lawyers participated in a die-in at the Criminal Justice Center.
Decisions by grand juries to not bring charges against police officers in the cases of Garner and of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, exposed flaws and reflect racism in the system, the lawyers in Brooklyn said.
Both Garner and Brown were black. The officers involved are white.
“We wanted to lend or voices to protest what’s been going on for decades, not only in this courthouse but in courthouses across the five boroughs and across the United States in terms of a really unequal criminal justice system,” Deborah Wright, president of the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys, said afterward.
Said another attorney, Nora Carroll: “We know that when a prosecutor wants an indictment, they can get one.”
Garner, a black man, was killed after an officer put him in a chokehold during an arrest on suspicion of selling loose cigarettes. The grand jury’s failure to indict has touched off a wave of protests, including one in Manhattan last week that drew tens of thousands of people.
(AP)
Join the official YWN WhatsApp status
One Response
Like duh!
Dead criminal don’t generate fees for lawyers.
Criminal defense lawyers don’t handle the wrongful death suits (personal injury lawyers do). Someone protesting loss of parnassah isn’t that newsworthy.