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Earlier this week, Judge Carlton Reeves, a federal District Court judge in Mississippi (that’s the trial-level court in the federal system), put out one of the most moving court opinions I’ve ever read. In the case, Jamison v. McClendon, a Black man is suing the police officer who pulled him over and subjected him to an excruciating two-hour search of him and his car, because he was convinced the man was carrying drugs (he was not).
It is getting attention because it finds that the officer cannot be sued individually due to the doctrine of “qualified immunity,” which in theory protects cops from harassing lawsuits from anyone they’ve ever arrested, but in practice allows officers to behave however they want without ever being held accountable. Judge Reeves says that the officer is entitled to qualified immunity under the law, but begs to be overturned. He follows the law, but rails against its unfairness.
My favorite part of the opinion, though, is actually after the long section on qualified immunity; it takes on whether the car search was even legal. Generally, search and seizure laws when it comes to cars suck, but you do have some privacy rights. A cop is not supposed to be able to just pull you over and start digging through your car—although you wouldn’t know it based on, you know, reality. In this case, both sides agreed that the officer didn’t have probable cause to go looking through the car, but Mr. Jamison, the driver, gave his consent for McClendon to search the car. The question is whether that “consent” was coerced or not.
In the testimony, it came out that McClendon asked Mr. Jamison to search his car five times. Four times, Mr. Jamison said no. A fifth time, he finally said yes. The legal standard here is one of “totality of the circumstances” and a sort of vague wave toward “reasonableness,” where a judge has to analyze various factors of the situation in a formalist way that leads them to a conclusion about whether the search was truly voluntary. The judge goes through this rigmarole and finds that based on the dry words on the page it is kind of a toss up (a “genuine factual dispute” in legalese).
But then he adds a dose of reality that is exceedingly rare in most judicial analysis (starts on page 51 if you’re following along, footnotes omitted):
A reader would be forgiven for pausing here and wondering whether we forgot to mention something. When in this analysis will the Court look at the elephant in the room—how race may have played a role in whether Officer McClendon’s actions were coercive?
Jamison was a Black man driving through Mississippi, a state known for the violent deaths of Black people and others who fought for their freedom. Pelahatchie is an hour south of Philadelphia, a town made infamous after a different kind of traffic stop resulted in the brutal lynching of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman. Pelahatchie is also less than 30 minutes east of Jackson, where on June 26, 2011, a handful of young white men and women engaged in some old-fashioned Redemption and murdered James Craig Anderson, a 47-year old Black, gay man. Pelahatchie is also in Rankin County, the same county the young people called home. Only a few miles separate the two communities.
For Black people, this isn’t mere history. It’s the present.
By the time Jamison was pulled over, more than 600 people had been killed by police officers in 2013 alone. Jamison was stopped just 16 days after the man who killed Trayvon Martin was acquitted. On that day, Alicia Garza wrote a Facebook post that said, “Black people. I love you. I love us. We matter. Our lives matter, Black lives matter.” And that week, “thousands of demonstrators gathered in dozens of cities” to commemorate Martin “and to add their voices to a debate on race that his death . . . set off.” A movement was in its early stages that would shine a light on killings by police and police brutality writ large – a problem Black people have endured since “states replaced slave patrols with police officers who enforced ‘Black codes.’”
Jamison’s traffic stop cannot be separated from this context. Black people in this country are acutely aware of the danger traffic stops pose to Black lives. Police encounters happen regardless of station in life or standing in the community; to Black doctors, judges, and legislators alike. United States Senator Tim Scott was pulled over seven times in one year— and has even been stopped while a member of what many refer to as “the world’s greatest deliberative body.” The “vast majority” of the stops were the result of “nothing more than driving a new car in the wrong neighborhood or some other reason just as trivial.”
The situation is not getting better. The number of people killed by police each year has stayed relatively constant, and Black people remain at disproportionate risk of dying in an encounter with police. It was all the way back in 1968 when Nina Simone famously said that freedom meant “no fear! I mean really, no fear!” Yet decades later, Black male teens still report a “fear of police and a serious concern for their personal safety and mortality in the presence of police officers.”
In an America where Black people “are considered dangerous even when they are in their living rooms eating ice cream, asleep in their beds, playing in the park, standing in the pulpit of their church, birdwatching, exercising in public, or walking home from a trip to the store to purchase a bag of Skittles,” who can say that Jamison felt free that night on the side of Interstate 20? Who can say that he felt free to say no to an armed Officer McClendon?
Judge Reeves finds the search was not legal in that context.
So much of criminal law, and specifically analyzing Constitutional-level violations, revolves around what a “reasonable person” would have done in this situation or that. Race, class, gender, power are almost never addressed in those situations. The “reasonable person” is supposed to be an “objective” sort of test, replacing how one person says they felt in a situation with a neutral or default, theoretical person should have felt. But who is the default person? Far too often, “reasonable” is substituted as “educated white man in the professional class,” because that is who judges consider reasonable.
If you don’t know by this point in the post, I should point out that Judge Reeves is Black. He has a very different view of what it might be reasonable for Mr. Jamison to do on the side of a dark road in Mississippi the fifth time an officer asks to search the car. I don’t think it should matter that Judge Reeves is Black: the realities of driving while Black and interacting with police while Black in this country are not a secret, and a white judge should have just as much empathy for what is reasonable under those circumstances. It shouldn’t, but it does. Of course it does.
That’s the whole thing, though, right? Mass incarceration is not just a project of racist policing, it takes judges and prosecutors and court staff and, yes, even defense attorneys that systemically dehumanize Black and brown lives daily in a litany of different ways, including this one, to make our hell of a system what it is.
Too many people in this country have criminal records because their reality did not conform to the reality of the “reasonable person” the judge saw in their mind when considering the case. That is, and should be, a deeply shameful part of our judicial system.
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