New Haven Independent

At the annual conference of the ACLU of Connecticut held at Quinnipiac University Saturday, the criminal defense lawyer and the policy reform advocate turned the heat up on a panel about criminal justice, warning of injustice to criminals in too many cases, and the unjust targeting of vulnerable communities.

Exhibit A: a tough mandatory minimum sentence for drug offenses within 1,500 feet of a school. “In urban communities, that covers everything,” protested Lorenzo Jones, executive director of the drug policy reform group A Better Way Foundation. “With suburban schools, that doesn’t even cover the soccer field.”

“In New Haven, only parts of the Yale golf course are outside the school zone!” added Norm Pattis, star civil rights attorney (and rare bookstore owner) based out of Bethany.

The way that plays out in the neighborhoods, explained Jones, is in the over-incarceration of inner-city residents — putting strain on the communities that can least afford it. “These drug policies are about creating a permanent underclass of people.” Jones’s foundation, started in 1999 to fight racial disparities in drug sentencing, is for an overall shift in response to drug offenders, from imprisonment to substance-abuse treatment. Meanwhile, A Better Way has fought for bills like the one passed last July to balance out punishment for crack cocaine, used mostly in black urban communities, and powder cocaine, more common in the suburbs among people “with skin like mine,” said Pattis.

But Jones isn’t resting on any laurels. “These reforms have been more like rearranging chairs on the deck of the Titanic,” he told Saturday’s auditorium of conference-goers. His frustration ran beyond biased drug policy to prejudiced leaders “ignorant to the daily life of these kids.” Heating up, Jones told about a white former prosecutor in the State Attorney’s office who confessed at a conference of the National Crime Prevention Council that he’d fought harder to keep white kids out of jails where they might be especially uncomfortable among mostly black kids. “And he said to us, ‘Does that make me a racist? No. Does it make my action racist? Yes.’ Well what the fuck does that make you if you’re the one doing it?!”

Pattis’s work to rout racism out of the system would start with representative juries. “How about two people of color on every jury?” he threw out. “Who cares if it takes a little longer to select them.” He used one of his current cases — in which both parties and all the witnesses are black — to paint the risks otherwise. “I’m afraid the all-white jury coming out of their million-dollar Manhattan apartments will get in there and just start convicting because they’re so scared of everybody!”

Pattis’s passion over violations of justice in Connecticut’s courtrooms matched Jones’s — he promised he would “choke up,” and describing the common prosecutors’ practice of showing just an incriminating fraction of a defendant’s videoed confession, he did — and swept even wider. “Post 9-11 the Fourth Amendment has evaporated. The government can eavesdrop with impunity, and the polls don’t explode. My question for this room is: What are you going to do about it?”

What he does about it is represent people case by case, as a criminal defense attorney, in their “fight for their lives against the government.” For Pattis, the defense of civil rights is the defense “in any case, of a person with a home and a family against an abstraction,” the State. It’s gotten harder, he said, citing the re-designation of more and more of what were once just misdemeanors under state law as felonies, now, under Homeland Security-obsessed federal law.

Pattis, like Jones, also came down hard on the high percentage of cases settled in plea bargains instead of trials. Plea bargains often force jail time upon innocent but vulnerable defendants who can’t afford the risk of the full sentence, he said, and they’re dangerous because done jury-less “behind closed doors.” Not that Pattis had much more faith in juries.

The red flags raised by other criminal justice-focused panelists included concern for prisoners with disabilities. With 16 percent of all prisoners mentally ill, “The Department of Correction has become the largest provider of treatment for mental illness in the state,” said Nancy Alisberg, a lead attorney with the State of Connecticut Office of Protection and Advocacy for Persons with Disabilities. “Though please understand that I use ‘treatment’ very lightly.” The mentally ill certainly don’t belong in isolated “Supermax” units, said Alisberg, where they get worse.

Alisberg’s report on the tough conditions of certain of Connecticut’s prison hit home for ACLU member Susan Simpson (pictured). Her epileptic son is awaiting trial at Osborn Correctional Institution, next to the new maximum-security Northern Correctional Institution in Somers. Simpson had come to the conference in part for the experts’ legal advice, and had come away nervous. “It wasn’t a felony,” she said about the “disturbance” her son had created, “but you know how Norm was saying a lot of misdemeanors are now felonies…I know the system’s corrupt.”

After the conference ended in a keynote address by journalist Cynthia Carr (pictured below), the ACLU crew lingered for signed copies of her Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, A Haunted Town, And the Hidden History of White America. The book, Carr’s dissection of the Marion, Indiana, culture surrounding the haunting 1930 lynching of two black men at the hands of a KKK mob that included Carr’s grandfather, is a challenge to white people to start filling in the pieces of America’s racial history “that nobody talks about.” “Much of this story is about shame. A lot of us who are white come from something we don’t want to discuss. We say, Oh that’s in the past. As if that’s not another hood to wear.”