The story of Joe Sullivan
Hi all 🕊️
Today is Juneteenth, also known as Freedom Day, an annual celebration of the slave emancipation in the U.S. In 1862, Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, but more isolated areas such as Texas were still fighting the Civil War. When the Confederate States surrendered in 1865, the total freedom of slaves was declared:
The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves…
We know today that although freedom was declared on paper, society didn’t follow suit. Segregation, discrimination and lynching of black people continued, and 100 years later, Martin Luther King, Jr. led the Civil Rights Movement ✊🏿 Racial segregation in schools, buses and public accommodations was prohibited, all states were stopped from banning interracial marriage, and all discrimination based on race, colour, religion, sex, or national origin in employment practices ended under the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
A leap for equality, but still, racism prevailed…
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Why it still matters: Joe Sullivan, a 13-year-old 👦🏾
Photo credit: eji.org
In 1989, 13-year-old Joe Sullivan was sentenced to life in prison, with no possibility of parole for a non-homocide offence. Earlier that year, he and two older boys had broken into a house and stolen jewellery. Later the same day, as the 72-year-old homeowner returned home, someone broke in and raped her. The two older boys accused Sullivan, and although he claimed his innocence and the woman never saw the face of her assailant, the jury believed the accusations, sentencing him to die in prison.
According to the Equal Justice Initiative, whose lawyers represented Sullivan, the trial was a farce. On the day of the trial, the opening statement started around 9am and verdict was given before 5pm. The prosecutor and witnesses made several unnecessary references to skin colour, saying the perpetrator was a ‘coloured boy’, and the victim white. Biological evidence was not presented, and had been destroyed before it could be DNA tested.
This is not a story about whether Joe Sullivan committed the crime or not—it’s about how the United States sentences 13-year-old children to life in prison and how skin colour impacts their likelihood of being sentenced. Here are some stats 📋
About 14% of all youth under 18 years old in the US are black. 42% of boys and 35% of girls in juvenile facilities are black. In 2017, 35% of all light offences in the US were committed by black youth, compared to 44% committed by white youth. Still, 54% of all youth transferred to adult court were black, whilst 31% were white.In the most severe crimes, 70% of 13 and 14-year-olds sentenced to die in prison are children of colour.🤵🏽 Sullivan’s lawyer, Bryan Stevenson, said:
These police shootings are symptoms of a larger disease […] Our society applies a presumption of dangerousness and guilt to young black men, and that’s what leads to wrongful arrests and wrongful convictions and wrongful death sentences, not just wrongful shootings. There’s no question that we have a long history of seeing people through this lens of racial difference. It’s a direct line from slavery to the treatment of black suspects today, and we need to acknowledge the shamefulness of that history.
📺 The documentary 13th by Ava DuVernay, explains how the judicial system in the US has been rigged to target black and minority people, for example through giving longer sentences for possession of crack (more used by black people) than cocaine (more used by white people).
Looking at the demography of judges in Alabama, we see some of these systemic challenges; 27% of the population is African-American, but the 19 judges who review death sentences are white and Republican—and 41 of the 42 elected district attorneys are white (numbers from 2016). It’s clear that such a homogeneous group of people will struggle to check their own bias 👨🦳👨🦳👨🦳
In 2017, Joe Sullivan was released. The 13-year-old boy had become a 41-year-old man. Throughout his time in adult prison, Sullivan was brutally victimised by older inmates, and has since been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and uses a wheelchair. Although, he’s a free man now—his life has been mostly destroyed.
When the system is rigged to work against you due to the colour of your skin—when one in four black men in the US will serve a prison sentence—millions of families and children suffer along, and the problem perpetuates.
This needs to change, we need to change.
📺 WATCH
Bryan Stevenson, the lawyer representing Joe Sullivan, gave a TED talk in 2012 about injustice of the U.S.’ justice system (highly recommended!)
🎧 LISTEN
New York Times recently did a podcast series on slavery, called 1619. A strong account of how slavery began in the US in 1619, it explains how Abraham Lincoln, the US president who declared the emancipation of slaves, did it not only for the right reasons. He freed the slaves to cripple the southern states—a war tactic.
📺 WATCH
13th, a documentary which untangles the mass incarceration in the US. It shows how Bill Clinton’s ‘tough on crime’ policies spiked the amount of people imprisoned—and how Clinton himself recognised decades later how they were wrong. Now free to watch on Youtube.
📰 READ
A very interesting piece on the illiberal liberals. A data analyst was recently fired in the US for a tweet, and a New York Times editor was fired for publishing an op-ed. People are ousting each other on Twitter, acting as an opinion police. Check it out!
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