A Tale of Two Trials

On June 1, Catrina Wallace, a 31-year-old black single mother, was sentenced by a Louisiana court to 15 years on bogus drug distribution charges. Less than two weeks later, former Bay Area Rapid Transit cop Johannes Mehserle walked out of prison after serving a mere eleven months for his 1 January 2009 killing of Oscar Grant, an unarmed young black man who was shot pointblank as he lay face down on the ground. These two cases exemplify how little has fundamentally changed in racist capitalist America in the half century since the height of the civil rights movement.

Catrina Wallace was convicted by a jury with just one black member. At Mehserle’s trial, which was moved from heavily black Oakland to Los Angeles, not one black person sat on the jury. Wallace was prosecuted as payback for her prominent role in organizing protests in defense of the Jena Six, young black men caught in a web of racist provocation and criminal prosecution in the Deep South. Mehserle received a meager sentence and early release in recognition of his role in enforcing racist law and order for the capitalist rulers.

This is what American “democracy” looks like: black people have no rights which the ruling class is bound to respect. Wallace was one of a dozen people arrested in July 2009 in a pre-dawn drug sweep involving over 150 cops from federal, state and local agencies. No drugs were ever found, and the only “evidence” was the word of a convicted drug dealer acting as a police informant. Wallace refused to plea-bargain, and on March 31 she was convicted on three counts of distribution of a controlled substance. Rather than allowing these sentences to be served concurrently (five years total), the court vindictively ordered her sentences to run consecutively, a measure usually reserved for serial killers and mafia dons. Free Catrina Wallace!

As we reported in “Jena, Louisiana: Free All Victims of Racist Cop Roundup!” (WV No. 978, 15 April), the plans for the drug sweep were hatched by Sheriff Scott Franklin in the immediate aftermath of the mass protest that shook Jena in September 2007. Tens of thousands of people from across the country marched through the town to protest on behalf of the Jena Six. That case began the previous year, when a black student received permission from a school official to sit under the so-called “white tree” at his high school, which is 80 percent white. The next day black students arrived to find three nooses hanging from a tree, leading to an impromptu protest some days later. That December, a white student found himself on the ground in a fight that ensued after he hurled the epithet “n----r” at a black youth, leading to the arrest of the six.

While Wallace’s black skin marked her as yet another of the millions who have been warehoused in prison hells under the racist “war on drugs,” Mehserle’s blue uniform gave him a license to kill. While the killer cops maraud through the ghettos and barrios with impunity, Mehserle briefly saw the inside of a prison cell, thanks to numerous video images recorded by horrified passengers on the platform of the Fruitvale BART stop in East Oakland. Mehserle was shown standing over Grant, drawing his Sig Sauer P226 semiautomatic and firing into Grant’s back as another cop held Grant face down with his hands behind his back, calling him a “bitch ass n----r.” The jury embraced Mehserle’s fairy tale that he had mistaken his gun, weighing over two and a half pounds, for a taser weighing less than a pound, and found him guilty of only “involuntary manslaughter.” Declaring that “this is not a case about race,” Judge Robert Perry gave Mehserle the lightest possible sentence.

Catrina Wallace joins hundreds of thousands of black men and women victimized by the “war on drugs.” If her conviction is not overturned, even if she were to leave prison tomorrow, Wallace would be deprived of basic rights. She would be barred from such services as public housing and welfare, denied the right to possess firearms and blacklisted from jobs. She also loses the right to vote for 15 years. Quite a different future awaits Mehserle. According to his lawyer Michael Rains, Mehserle plans to return to the Bay Area, hoping to find work in sales or retail “because he’s so good with people”!

Racist cop-judicial terror is integral to American capitalism, which was founded on black chattel slavery and is maintained on the brutal oppression of black people, who are overwhelmingly segregated on the bottom of society. Justice for Catrina Wallace and the millions of other victims of this barbaric system requires nothing less than a proletarian socialist revolution that will sweep racist capitalism into the dustbin of history.