{"id":163827,"date":"2020-06-29T12:00:52","date_gmt":"2020-06-29T11:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=163827"},"modified":"2020-06-29T10:17:29","modified_gmt":"2020-06-29T09:17:29","slug":"my-student-comes-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/06\/my-student-comes-home\/","title":{"rendered":"My Student Comes Home"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Lawrence Bell was 14, orphaned and living in an abandoned house when three Camden cops pressured him to sign a confession to murder without any counsel or guardian.<\/em><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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29 Jun 2020, <\/em>Rahway, New Jersey – <\/em>When Lawrence Bell, an orphan living in an abandoned house in Camden, New Jersey, went to prison he was 14-years-old. Barely literate and weighing no more than 90 pounds, he had been pressured by three Camden police detectives into signing a confession for a murder and rape he insisted at his trial he did not commit. It made no difference. The confession condemned him, although there was no physical evidence or any witnesses tying him to the brutal killing and rape of a young mother. He would not be eligible to go before a parole board for 56 years. It was a de facto<\/em> life sentence.But on Sunday, thanks to the dogged work of Jennifer Sellitti, a public attorney who is in charge of training the state attorney general\u2019s 600 lawyers, Lawrence walked out of East Jersey State Prison after serving thirty years and one day. Sellitti, who devoted two-and-a-half years to freeing Lawrence and who openly wept in court, used Lawrence\u2019s case as a prototype for re-sentencing hearings for juveniles that were tried as adults. Lawrence will attempt, with no money and few connections, to start a life interrupted by a dysfunctional judicial and prison system, filled mostly with 2.3 million poor men and women like Lawrence. It was a tiny victory in a sea of defeats.<\/p>\n

Lawrence and I walked the two blocks from the prison to the QuickChek, a ritual for most prisoners released from East Jersey State Prison. The convenience store, which can be seen from the barred windows, has a mythic status in the prison, a symbol for those locked inside of the outside world.<\/p>\n

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Lawrence Bell [right], moments after being released from East Jersey State Prison on Sunday, is greeted by his friend Ron Pierce [left], who was also incarcerated for three decades.<\/p><\/div>\n

“I feel a mixture of excitement and trepidation,\u201d he said. \u201cIt feels so strange right now to be walking outside without handcuffs and shackles.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHow long has it been since you walked outside as a free man?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cThirty years and one day,\u201d he said. \u201cJune 27, 1990 I came into prison at 14-years-old. I\u2019m now going on 45-years old. It\u2019s amazing. It\u2019s scary. But it\u2019s here.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said he was up at 4:00 a.m. to wait by his cell door. He was released at 8:30.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s bittersweet,\u201d he said of his release. \u201cA lot of these guys I grew up with. They\u2019re my brothers, they\u2019re not my friends. As happy as I am to be leaving, I won\u2019t ever forget the fact that I\u2019m leaving people I love and care for behind. But this is just a chance to help \u2018em, man, to come back for \u2018em, just like everybody came back for me. We got to go back for them, too. As I say, it\u2019s bittersweet, but somebody got to go at some point to start bringing other people home. And that\u2019s just the way I try and keep it in focus, keep myself from having like survivor\u2019s guilt.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe hardest thing about getting out is the unknown, not knowing what I\u2019m gonna face, not knowing what\u2019s gonna be there, what\u2019s not gonna be there, who\u2019s gonna be there, particularly for me coming in as a kid, as literally a child,\u201d he said. \u201cThese are my first steps in the free world as a grown man. I don\u2019t know how to pay a bill. I don\u2019t know how to open a bank account. I don\u2019t know how to apply for insurance. There are so many things I don\u2019t know, and I think that is probably the scariest thing for me, trying to figure out how to exist as a grown man in a free world after 30 years.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you thought about getting out was there one thing you wanted to do in particular?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs crazy as this sounds, I want to ride a bike and go swimming,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t know why. I think that might be a reflection of the fact that I got locked up as a child. I kind of think about the things that I left off doing as a child. I also look forward to getting up that first morning and sitting outside and having myself a cup of coffee on the steps, just quiet, just enjoying freedom.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lawrence entered the QuickChek, clutching some cash friends had handed to him, and came out with a bouquet of flowers for his lawyer.<\/p>\n

The police violence in the streets of American cities is savage and lethal, but its counterpart is our monstrous prison system where the poor are railroaded into cages by courts that coerce 94 percent to take plea deals rather than jury trials. The poor are imprisoned for decades for crimes they did not commit or with sentences for crimes they did commit that are four or five times longer than in any other industrialized country. We have 25 percent of the world\u2019s prison population but are 4 percent of the global population. Half of those in our prison system have never been charged with physically harming another person.<\/p>\n

The poor rarely get adequate legal representation and once locked up usually depend on self-taught prison paralegals to help them file desperate appeals, although many sentences increasingly come with the stipulation that there can be no appeals. Hiring an outside attorney to file an appeal costs as much as $100,000, a sum neither they nor their families can obtain.<\/p>\n

Prisons, along with the police, are the twin pillars of social control. They are used by the ruling elites to keep those discarded by deindustrialization and austerity fearful, intimidated and neutralized. Break the reigns of terror by the police and the bonds of the world\u2019s largest prison system and the ruling elites will stand naked before us. And this is why the reigning oligarchs, despite gaslighting us with promises of reform, have no intention of weakening the two principle institutions that keep those they have betrayed in bondage and themselves in power.<\/p>\n

Lawrence, who I taught in the B.A. program in the New Jersey prison system run by Rutgers University and who has a 4.0 GPA, never had a chance. He lived at 14 different addresses, a common experience for the poor who are repeatedly evicted from their homes and often suffer from the same perimigration trauma I witnessed among refugees and the displaced in war zones. (Perimigration<\/a> is the phase between initial displacement and eventual resettlement.)<\/p>\n

Like orphaned children buffeted by war, Lawrence endured extreme poverty, chronic instability, physical abuse and the early death of his parents. He lived in constant fear, even terror, amid street violence \u2014 Camden per capita was often ranked as the most dangerous city in America \u2014 was exploited by drug dealers, deprived of his most basic needs, and was rejected and outcast by the wider society. He never had an adequate income or sufficient food.<\/p>\n

Lawrence, terrified and alone in the Camden police interrogation room, was repeatedly assured by the detectives that they wanted to help him, that if that if he signed the papers he could go home, that 10 years would immediately be taken off his sentence. He had no family to intercede on his behalf or legal representation. His father had died when he was about two. His mother, who had raised him and his sister, had died in June 1985 when he was nine. His forlorn efforts at his trial to recant the confession, to insist he did not commit the crime and did not understand what was in the confession or its consequences, were brushed aside by Judge Isaiah Steinberg.<\/p>\n

He was charged with murder, aggravated sexual assault, kidnapping, and related offenses in the 1990 rape and murder. Steinberg, when he announced the aggregate sentence of life plus 50 years with 55 years to be served without parole, sneeringly called Lawrence in the courtroom a \u201cdespicable coward.\u201d Lawrence was 14 at the time of the crime. He was 15 when the court told him he was an adult. He was 16 during his trial. He would be 70 before he could see a parole board.<\/p>\n

[Judge] Steinberg, when he announced the aggregate sentence of life plus 50 years with 55 years to be served without parole, sneeringly called Lawrence in the courtroom a \u201cdespicable coward.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Lawrence, who I taught in several classes, was one of my most dedicated and gifted students. If I mentioned a book that was not required reading, he made huge efforts to obtain it and read it. At the end of a history course I taught called Conquest \u2014 we read Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent<\/em>, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West, <\/em>and The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L\u2019Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution \u2014 <\/em>Lawrence waited until the classroom was empty. He told me, \u201cI know I am going to die in this prison, but I work as hard as I do so one day I can be a teacher like you.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lawrence\u2019s life was a train wreck of abuse and neglect, one that defines the lives of many of my students. He suffered terrible physical abuse from his mother\u2019s boyfriend Reggie. The tragic struggles of the poor are rendered largely invisible by a corporate media that caters to the demands of advertisers and is addicted to ratings. This is why protestors in poor neighborhoods attack camera crews. It is why crowds trashed the CNN headquarters in Atlanta. The poor know that these reporters only appear to film or write about looting, fires and rioting, never exposing or explaining the long slow drip of neglect, poverty, police terror, mass incarceration and humiliation that make the eruptions comprehensible.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy earliest memory is of coming home from kindergarten,\u201d Lawrence said. \u201cMy mom and I would watch TV shows together in the afternoons. That day, I came in through the door and saw my mom sitting on the couch with Reggie holding a shotgun to her head. And she said in a very calm voice, \u2018Go upstairs.\u2019 And so, I did. Something didn\u2019t feel right, but I didn\u2019t understand what was going on. At that age, you believe your mom, so I thought everything must be OK.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI had a couple of guinea pigs that I would take care of, and they can be dirty and will, you know, make a mess everywhere,\u201d he said. \u201cOne day, Reggie told me to clean up after them, and I said, \u2018Yeah, OK,\u2019 but I didn\u2019t clean up the mess right away. So, later on, without saying anything, he brought his dog up to the second floor where the guinea pigs were kept. He let his dog behind the gate at the top of the stairs and the dog went in and ate the guinea pigs. He would do things like that. Just sadistic. Another time, we had some small dogs like poodles that were outside one night \u2014 and this was winter \u2014 and he took some water and threw it all over them and closed the door with them still outside. They froze to death.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was like walking on eggshells all the time. Everyone would have to be quiet whenever he was home. My mom would try to keep us all quiet by having us play board games or do other quiet things. The door was set up with a lock on the inside and the outside, so you would need a key to get out of the house. And we couldn\u2019t go into the basement or their bedroom. They were off limits. I don\u2019t think I saw into my mom and Reggie\u2019s bedroom until I was maybe seven or eight years old. I can remember hearing fights going on upstairs. Like, you would hear things being thrown around and breaking or like my mom being thrown around. And then, after a few minutes, there would just be silence. He would come downstairs like nothing had happened and leave. Then we would go find my mom and she would have a swollen face and bruises, putting ice on her face in front of the mirror. And I just remember wanting to get bigger so I could beat him up. I wanted to kill him for doing that to my mom. The saddest thing was that even when he wasn\u2019t home, we would still act like he was. Because he drove a tow truck for work, we didn\u2019t know when he was going to show up, so we always acted like he was home.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lawrence\u2019s oldest brother, Gary, was about 20. He was in and out of prison. He was \u201ceverybody\u2019s hero because he would stand up to Reggie.\u201d By the time Lawrence was seven or eight the only children left in the house were his sister, who Reggie sexually molested, and himself. His sister once jumped from the attic window trying to escape from Reggie and broke her ankles. Reggie\u2019s fury and violence intensified. His mother tried to leave, but Reggie would take Lawrence or his sister hostage until his mother returned. Reggie once took Lawrence when he was about seven or eight to the apartment of a stranger after picking him up from school. Reggie called his mother and said he was going to give Lawrence pills, which he told Lawrence was candy. His mother shouted over the phone for him not to swallow the pills. She agreed to come back to Reggie if he would hand her son back to her.<\/p>\n

Reggie called his mother and said he was going to give Lawrence pills, which he told Lawrence was candy. His mother shouted over the phone for him not to swallow the pills. She agreed to come back to Reggie if he would hand her son back to her.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cFor a long time, I was angry with her for not leaving,\u201d he said. \u201cI blamed her for allowing us to be abused by him. But later on, as I thought more about it, I could see how she couldn\u2019t leave. I learned about Battered Woman Syndrome and how people can be manipulated, and I know that that\u2019s what happened to her. After being angry with her for years, I was able to let go of blaming her. I forgave her. And then I also had to forgive myself for ever blaming her.\u201d<\/p>\n

On June 22, 1985 his mother collapsed in the kitchen.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe called 9-1-1,\u201d he said. \u201cI held her head in my lap while we waited for the ambulance to come. It was a blood clot in her lung, a pulmonary embolism. She was dead there on the floor, but I think they revived her at the hospital. Then she died on the operating table, if I remember correctly.\u201d<\/p>\n

Reggie came home that night from the hospital.<\/p>\n

\u201cYour mother died, and I don\u2019t want to hear anything out of you,\u201d he told the children.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe forbade us from crying about it,\u201d Lawrence said. \u201cI remember the exact song that was playing when he told us she died. My sister and I just sat there in the living room for what must have been a long time. For months after she died, I wouldn\u2019t speak to anyone. Sometimes I would whisper to my sister, but I stopped talking to other people for a while. Before she died, I didn\u2019t smoke weed. Before she died, I was a good student. I started getting into trouble at school after that. I got into my first fight that year in school, my first physical fight. A kid said something about my mom, some joke about her being stupid. I grabbed a chair and hit him with it. I think there was a rage inside of me that wasn\u2019t there before. No school counselor or anyone else talked to me. I am the epitome of systemic failures. If you want to talk about how systems fail, just look at my life. There isn\u2019t anyone available to help you in that situation. I never remember the police coming around the house except for maybe once when my brothers were brought home for playing hooky. So, after the police left, we all watched as they got beaten. But no one ever intervened.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNo school counselor or anyone else talked to me. I am the epitome of systemic failures. If you want to talk about how systems fail, just look at my life. There isn\u2019t anyone available to help you in that situation.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The death of Lawrence\u2019s mother deeply affected his older brother Troy who was manic-depressive and an alcoholic. Troy, after his mother\u2019s death, tried to kill himself by cutting his arm from his wrist almost to his elbow with a hunting knife.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was sitting on the porch with my sister when Troy called once,\u201d Lawrence said. \u201cHe was crying and drunk. He told her that he was going to kill himself. So, I got in my car, I had been driving since I was twelve, and drove over to the cemetery where my mom was buried. He was sitting at her grave. He was drunk and crying and said he wanted to die. I went over to talk to him. And I\u2019m not sure if it was a moment of clarity or a moment of acceptance, but I went back to my car and got my gun. I loaded it and handed it to him and said, \u2018Here. If you want to die, put it in your mouth. You won\u2019t miss.\u2019 He looked at me for a moment, then he got up and walked to my car and got in.\u201d<\/p>\n

Troy later tried to commit suicide by stabbing himself in the stomach. Troy visited Lawrence in prison a few times.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe died a few years ago from heart complications, tuberculosis, alcoholism \u2014 you pick the reason,\u201d Lawrence said.<\/p>\n

Six months after his mother died Reggie was arrested and sent to prison. Lawrence moved in with an older woman, a friend of his mother\u2019s, who lived across the street, who he called Grandma. But she soon left for New York City and passed Lawrence into the care of her daughter Debbie, who was bipolar and physically abusive.<\/p>\n

\u201cDebbie was sort of like my guardian, if you can call her that, but she wasn\u2019t officially my guardian,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s now an issue in my case \u2014 to this day, the state of New Jersey doesn\u2019t know who my legal guardian was after my mom died. Debbie wasn\u2019t legally responsible for me, so she wasn\u2019t able to give the police permission to interrogate me like they claimed. I got left with Debbie because I guess Grandma thought it would be good for Debbie to have the responsibility of taking care of me. She thought it would calm her down and give her more stability.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cReggie\u2019s abuse was sometimes physical but mostly psychological, but Debbie\u2019s was just physical,\u201d he said. \u201cIt would get to the point where it was a preemptive beating. When I\u2019d come home from school, she\u2019d say, \u2018I know you did something,\u2019 and beat me. And she was smoking and selling weed. The house was raided by police multiple times when I was staying there. She got me to sell weed for her. She\u2019d say that if I wanted new sneakers, I would need to earn them. I\u2019d see other boys I knew selling drugs and making money. One day Debbie asked me where my friends were getting their money from, and I said drugs. She said, \u2018Well, why don\u2019t you go out there with them?\u2019 So, I started selling for her. I\u2019d sell dime bags. One package was 35 bags, so I\u2019d give $300 to Debbie and keep $50 for myself. That was a standard cut at the time. After that, I always had money. I saved a lot of what I made. I was the kind of kid who would keep at least $20 in my shoe at all times. I would take my money, go buy an ounce of weed, pack it up into bags, and sell it myself. I was making more that way. That was the end of depending on her.\u201d<\/p>\n

He still had a key to his old house on 25th Street, although it was abandoned. He started sleeping there at night. He carried a gun, a .32 special, fearful of being robbed.<\/p>\n

\u201cBefore I went to sleep, I\u2019d spread some gravel over the porch so that I could hear if anyone came up to the house during the night,\u201d he said. \u201cI could sell drugs and take care of myself without her. My sister was still around. She would argue with me and tell me I needed to stop selling, but at the same time, she was accepting my help. She had little kids by now and she was struggling financially. So, even though she didn\u2019t want me to sell drugs, she needed Pampers for her kids and she accepted my money.\u201d<\/p>\n

He got a girl pregnant when he was thirteen. She had an abortion.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt felt like another loss,\u201d he said. \u201cI never had suicidal thoughts or a desire to die like Troy, but I will say that I was sort of numb. I didn\u2019t care about living. One night \u2026 I was sitting on my porch smoking weed and taking pain pills. I was drinking beer, too. I had been given a prescription for the pills because I was hit by a car and broke both of my knees. I also had head trauma from the car accident. I was sitting in a chair on my porch with my legs propped up because they were in a soft cast, and taking these pills, but they weren\u2019t helping. I took another one, and nothing. I took a few more, still nothing \u2014 no help with the pain. A friend of mine had some Xanax, so he gave me some, and I took one or two. Not long after that, my sister came over and saw me on the porch with the pills. And she said, \u2018What are you doing mixing those pills with all of that? You\u2019re gonna kill yourself.\u2019 And my response was just, so? That was my attitude toward life then \u2013 I didn\u2019t care if I died.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cImagine that you are fourteen, still a kid, and you are brought into a courtroom,\u201d he said. \u201cYou have these adults around that you\u2019ve never met before and they are saying things you don\u2019t understand. You catch a few words like \u2018murder\u2019 and \u2018rape,\u2019 but you still don\u2019t know what they are talking about. It happens really fast and then they take you away, back to the youth house \u2014 the correctional facility. That\u2019s what it was like. That whole hearing was like a blur. Next thing I know I\u2019m in the youth house, I was meeting with a lawyer, then going to see a psychiatrist for an evaluation. But I don\u2019t fully understand what\u2019s going on. That\u2019s why I never want to be in a situation where I can\u2019t follow what the people around me are saying. Part of what drives me to learn and be ready for anything, any conversation, is wanting to prevent that from ever happening again.\u201d<\/p>\n

He spent 22 months in jail before going to trial.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe judge decided to charge me as an adult because of the seriousness of the crime,\u201d Lawrence said. \u201cHe said I didn\u2019t seem remorseful. But what they didn\u2019t think about was the effect that being in jail had on me. I saw two people get killed when I was there. During the trial, my mind was partially focused on that, keeping myself prepared for going back into that situation. They interpreted that as indifference and a lack of remorse. One thing that the judge said has stuck with me. He called me \u2018irredeemable.\u2019 I\u2019ve been working hard and working on myself all this time to prove him wrong. I want him to be able to look at me and admit that he was wrong about [that]. If I saw him again, I\u2019d tell him, \u2018You were wrong about me. But that\u2019s OK, it\u2019s OK as long as other kids \u2014 babies \u2014 don\u2019t end up being locked up like I was.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe judge decided to charge me as an adult because of the seriousness of the crime. He said I didn\u2019t seem remorseful. But what they didn\u2019t think about was the effect that being in jail had on me. I saw two people get killed when I was there. During the trial, my mind was partially focused on that, keeping myself prepared for going back into that situation. They interpreted that as indifference and a lack of remorse.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cAfter the trial, they took me away, stripped me down and put me in a jail uniform,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s when it became real and I knew what was happening. I went to the jail that night, but the people at the jail didn\u2019t want to admit me at first. I was so small and looked young. They were calling their supervisors to find out what to do with me. That first night I was put in a holding cell with other guys. And one of the guys was staring at me, looking at me funny. I started a fight with him \u2014 I felt like I had to. I was taken away and I ended up being placed in protective custody. It\u2019s a block for anyone who can\u2019t be in the general population. I was in isolation. It\u2019s called \u201823 and one\u2019 \u2014 23 hours in isolation and one hour outside of your cell each day. I would count all the bricks in my cell, all the lines on the walls. I still do that. I will count all of the photos in a magazine or every time a word or phrase shows up in a book. I learned that habit while in isolation. The hardest part, probably, is being alone with your thoughts. They were concerned for my safety because I was so small and skinny. But there were, I think, six pedophiles on that block. I wanted out. So, I signed a waiver so that I could join the general population.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lawrence\u2019s brother Gary was known within the prison population. His friends watched out for Lawrence, who was now 17-years-old and at Garden State prison.<\/p>\n

\u201cA man named Salaam, who was like a father figure to me, really took care of me,\u201d he said. \u201cWhenever I was getting into trouble or fights, he\u2019d come and talk to me. Reverend Du Bois was another person who helped me a lot. He was the head chaplain at Garden State. He showed me respect and really cared about me even though I was Muslim, and he was Christian.\u201d<\/p>\n

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East Jersey State Prison<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cThere was a time when members of the Bloods tried to take over the chapel,\u201d he said. \u201cSome guys, including me, intervened on behalf of Reverend Du Bois. He was really well-liked and respected by everyone. In the end, the Bloods backed off. I bring up this story because not all Christians were as accepting of me as a Muslim as Rev. Du Bois. Years ago, I wrote to Centurion ministries asking for help with my case. They said they wanted to help but that they were focused on helping Christians, not Muslims. They might have felt differently about taking on my case if they had known how I\u2019d put my neck on the line to help Christians like Rev. Du Bois.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I was young, people didn\u2019t give me chance,\u201d he said. \u201cNobody intervened, nobody tried to help or took me aside and said that they believed in me. But once I got to prison, I encountered people who cared about me and really wanted to help. As soon as I was given a chance, I took to it like a fish to water. So many teachers and classes have had an impact on me over the years. My teachers have been mentors. They stand as examples of what I want to be and show me what is possible. Every day, I am trying to make progress and be a little better than I was yesterday. I\u2019m always learning, growing. It may be that today I learn a new word or work through a puzzle \u2013 anything that challenges me. Something in me pushes me to keep getting better. My most prized possessions are my books. I have nice, hardbound editions of The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid,<\/em> and others. I love reading Homer and Ovid and the classics. I\u2019ve read everything that Shakespeare has written. I actually have a one-volume edition of Shakespeare\u2019s works. I like his sonnets and comedies the most. My favorite book is probably Manchild in the Promised Land<\/em> by Claude Brown. I read that one a long time ago and still like it. You\u2019ve read Dante\u2019s Divine Comedy<\/em>, right? Right now, I am writing a book that follows my life as a journey through the different stages in the Divine Comedy<\/em>. It sees my own experiences as part of a journey that leads to the discovery of self. I remember thinking when I first read the Divine Comedy<\/em> that his idea of Purgatory is sort of what it feels like being in prison.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the fall he will finish his degree at Rutgers. We will pool our meager resources, because no one else will, to help him resurrect his life. It is a victory for us. But it does nothing to halt the onslaught that continues around us.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Lawrence would not have walked out of East Jersey State Prison on Sunday without Sellitti.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I first started as a lawyer, my boss in Wooster was this guy named Mike Hussy, who is an amazing attorney,\u201d Sellitti told me. \u201cHe\u2019s retired now. And I would go to court all the time, and I would come back from court, you know this little new lawyer, and he would say to me, \u2018Doing justice?\u2019 And on the days when I did something great in court, when I got a great victory for a client, I\u2019d be like \u2018Yeah! Yeah! I\u2019m doing justice!\u2019 And on the days when things went wrong, I\u2019d be like, \u2018No, no justice today.\u2019 And then finally, one day, I believed my client was innocent, but he got such a good deal and he really wanted to take it. I didn\u2019t want him to, but I understood what he was doing, and he took it. I came back to the office and he asked, \u2018Doing justice?\u2019 I said, \u2018I have absolutely no idea.\u2019 He said, \u2018I\u2019ve been asking you that question for two years, and you finally got the answer right.\u2019 And that\u2019s like, kind of the best way you can look at the system. Half the time, I\u2019m like, I don\u2019t know.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those who know Lawrence and who were released before him have used the last few weeks to fill my garage with household items. We applied for and received a grant from the Lilah Hilliard Fisher foundation to rent a small apartment in East Orange, NJ. In the fall he will finish his degree at Rutgers. We will pool our meager resources, because no one else will, to help him resurrect his life. It is a victory for us. But it does nothing to halt the onslaught that continues around us. There is only triage, the attempts, often by those most abused by the system, to extract a little justice. I cling emotionally to these tiny victories \u2014 a job for a student who was released, covering the rent for a student who got out and was evicted from his fianc\u00e9e\u2019s trailer because of his conviction 30 years earlier, buying a computer for a student who matriculated to Rutgers but did not have any money. These victories keep me going, but they do little to blunt our callous indifference to the most vulnerable among us.<\/p>\n

You become fatalistic, you strive against a monolithic evil knowing that whatever you achieve is Pyrrhic, that the system flourishes despite your efforts. And yet, what binds you, what keeps you going, are these relationships. How can you walk away? How can you do nothing? If you stand with the oppressed and are defeated have you failed? Or does one succeed by simply being willing to make that journey, to show them they are not forgotten, not alone? And while Lawrence\u2019s release is minuscule when set against the vast injustice around us, it is not minuscule to us.<\/p>\n

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in the last volume of the Gulag Archipelago,<\/em> once he is released and sent into internal exile, writes of a Serb, a teacher, also in forced exile, named Georgi Stepanovich Mitrovich. He, too, had been recently freed from the gulag. Mitrovich would not give up his dogged battle with local authorities for justice for his students.<\/p>\n

\u201cHis battle was utterly hopeless, and he knew it,\u201d Solzhenitsyn wrote. \u201cNo one could unravel that tangled skein. And if he had won hands down, it would have done nothing to improve the social order<\/em>, the system. It would have been no more than a brief, vague gleam of hope in one narrow little spot, quickly swallowed by the clouds. Nothing that victory might bring could balance the risk of rearrest \u2014 which was the price he might pay.\u201d (Only the Khrushchev era saved Mitrovich).<\/p>\n

\u201cYes, his battle was hopeless, but it was human to be outraged by injustice, even to the point of courting destruction! His struggle could only end in defeat \u2014 but no one could possibly call it useless. If we had not all been so sensible, not all been forever whining to each other: \u2018It won\u2019t help! It can\u2019t do any good!\u2019 our land would have been quite different.\u201d<\/p>\n

______________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for\u00a0<\/em>The New York Times,\u00a0where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for\u00a0<\/em>The Dallas Morning News,\u00a0The Christian Science Monitor, and<\/em> NPR. Until this month, he wrote a weekly column for the online magazine\u00a0<\/em>Truthdig. He is the host of the Emmy Award-nominated <\/em>RT America show\u00a0<\/em>On Contact.<\/em><\/p>\n

Copyright 2020 Chris Hedges<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original – scheerpost.com<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

29 Jun 2020 – When Lawrence Bell, an orphan living in an abandoned house in Camden, New Jersey, went to prison he was 14-years-old. Barely literate and weighing no more than 90 pounds, he had been pressured by three Camden police detectives into signing a confession for a murder and rape he insisted at his trial he did not commit. It made no difference. He would not be eligible to go before a parole board for 56 years. It was a de facto life sentence.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":122602,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[867,651,1281,103,70],"class_list":["post-163827","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america","tag-anglo-america","tag-justice","tag-police-brutality","tag-racism","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163827","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=163827"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163827\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/122602"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=163827"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=163827"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=163827"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}