Social Movements & the Law

Introduction: The death penalty, also known as capital punishment, is the practice of executing individuals who have been convicted of certain serious — August 22, 2023

This ethnographic study, which includes participant observation research and in-depth interviews with police officers in a major California city and a large East Coast city, explores how police officers use their discretionary time on the job--and the consequences. Providing highly textured insights into police discretion, the authors show that America's "tough on crime" approach to justice has too often proved to be a smoke screen for controlling people deemed undesirable, rather than a genuinely effective strategy for reducing crime.

"Prompted by several recent high-visibility killings by police officers the U.S. civil rights enforcement regime is the subject of focused attention at the national state and local levels."

Following the high-profile deaths of eighteen-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and twenty-five-year-old Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland, both cities erupted in protest over the unjustified homicides of unarmed black males at the hands of police officers. These local tragedies--and the protests surrounding them--assumed national significance, igniting fierce debate about the fairness and efficacy of the American criminal justice system. Yet, outside the gaze of mainstream attention, how do local residents and protesters in Ferguson and Baltimore understand their own experiences with race, place, and policing? In Hands Up, Don't Shoot, Jennifer Cobbina draws on in-depth interviews with nearly two hundred residents of Ferguson and Baltimore, conducted within two months of the deaths of Brown and Gray. She examines how protesters in both cities understood their experiences with the police, how those experiences influenced their perceptions of policing, what galvanized Black Lives Matter as a social movement, and how policing tactics during demonstrations influenced subsequent mobilization decisions among protesters. Ultimately, she humanizes people's deep and abiding anger, underscoring how a movement emerged to denounce both racial biases by police and the broader economic and social system that has stacked the deck against young black civilians.

I have been in the reparations movement for nearly 50 years, and I’ve never been more optimistic about its chances for success.

"In 1994 death penalty lawyer Stephen Bright published his seminal essay Counsel for the Poor: The Death Sentence Not for the Worst Crime but for the Worst Lawyer. His argument 'succinctly stated in the title' was that indigent defendants were disproportionately sentenced to death because their lawyers (who were often court-appointed) were under-resourced ill-prepared and failed at the most basic levels in their duty to represent their clients."

"When Freddie Gray was arrested for possessing an 'illegal knife' in April 2015, he was, by eyewitness accounts that video evidence later confirmed, treated 'roughly' as police loaded him into a vehicle. By the end of his trip in the police van, Gray was in a coma he would never recover from. In the wake of a long history of police abuse in Baltimore, this killing felt like a final straw--it led to a week of protests and then five days described alternately as a riot or an uprising that set the entire city on edge, and caught the nation's attention. Wes Moore is one of Baltimore's most famous sons--a Rhodes Scholar, bestselling author, decorated combat veteran, White House fellow, and current President of the Robin Hood Foundation. While attending Gray's funeral, he saw every strata of the city come together: grieving mothers; members of the city's wealthy elite; activists; and the long-suffering citizens of Baltimore--all looking to comfort each other, but also looking for answers Knowing that when they left the church, these factions would spread out to their own corners, but that the answers they were all looking for could only be found in the city as a whole, Moore--along with Pulitzer-winning coauthor Erica Green--tells the story of the Baltimore uprising. Through both his own observations, and through the eyes of other Baltimoreans: Partee, a conflicted black captain of the Baltimore Police Department; Jenny, a young white public defender who's drawn into the violent center of the uprising herself; Tawanda, a young black woman who'd spent a lonely year protesting the killing of her own brother by police; and John DeAngelo, scion of the city's most powerful family and owner of the Baltimore Orioles, who has to make choices of conscience he'd never before confronted. Each shifting point of view contributes to an engrossing, cacophonous account of one of the most consequential moments in our recent history--but also an essential cri de coeur about the deeper causes of the violence and the small seeds of hope planted in its aftermath"--;Baltimore When Freddie Gray was arrested for possessing an 'illegal knife' in April 2015, he was, by eyewitness accounts that video evidence later confirmed, treated 'roughly' as police loaded him into a vehicle. By the end of his trip in the police van, Gray was in a coma he would never recover from. This killing led to a week of protests and then five days described alternately as a riot or an uprising that set the entire city on edge, and caught the nation's attention. Moore attended Gray's funeral, and saw every strata of the city come together, all looking to comfort each other, but also looking for answers. Through shifting points of view, Moore and Green create an engrossing account of the deep causes of the violence-- and the small seeds of hope planted in its aftermath. -- adapted from jacket

"Against a backdrop of increasing national attention to police violence the Supreme Court on Thursday issued an opinion in a closely watched criminal-procedure case that clarifies the meaning of the term seizure."

"On July 23, 1967, the eyes of the nation fixed on Detroit as thousands took to the streets to vent their frustrations with white racism, police brutality, and vanishing job prospects in the place that gave rise to the American Dream. For mainstream observers, the "riot" brought about the ruin of a once-great city, and then in 2013, the city's municipal bankruptcy served as a bailout that paved the way for Detroit to finally be rebuilt. Challenging this prevailing view, Scott Kurashige portrays the past half-century as a long "rebellion" the underlying tensions of which continue to haunt the city and the U.S. nation-state. Michigan's scandal-ridden emergency-management regime represents the most concerted effort to quell this rebellion by disenfranchising the majority black citizenry and neutralizing the power of unions. The corporate architects of Detroit's restructuring have championed the creation of a "business-friendly" city where billionaire developers are subsidized to privatize and gentrify downtown while working-class residents are squeezed out by rampant housing evictions, school closures, water shutoffs, toxic pollution, and militarized policing. From the grassroots, however, Detroit has emerged as an international model for survival, resistance, and solidarity through the creation of urban farms, freedom schools, and self-governing communities. A quintessential American story of tragedy and hope, The Fifty-Year Rebellion forces us to look in the mirror and ask, Are we succumbing to authoritarian plutocracy, or can we create a new society rooted in social justice and participatory democracy?"--Provided by publisher.

A law professor and author of a new book on bigotry discusses key cases now in front of the US Supreme Court that could redefine who bigots really are.

In almost every highly publicized case of police using deadly force and killing unarmed individuals, the person killed was an African American male. These incidents have caused dramatic erosion in public confidence in the justice system and America's promise of equal treatment under the law. Minority communities lack confidence in our judicial system. First, we must recognize our own biases. We all have them. No one is exempt. The biggest challenge, however, is to figure out what we do once we recognize them. For those working in the justice system, from police to prosecutors and judges, and yes, even public defenders, the consequences have broad, far-reaching, and sometimes even fatal consequences.

More timely now than ever, Deadly Force is a powerful indictment of police misconduct, a reminder of this issues long, tortured history and of how far we still have to go. From the host of MSNBCs The Last Word with Lawrence ODonnell, the riveting story of a 1975 police shooting of an unarmed black man in Boston - one of the first to draw national headlines - and the dramatic investigation and court case that followed.

For much of its history, the death penalty in the United States has been framed as a tool of justice—a way to hold the most vicious criminals accountable for their heinous acts. Stories of grisly ...

"From an award-winning historian, a groundbreaking portrait of pervasive exploitation and radical resistance in America, told through the turbulent history of St. Louis. From Lewis and Clark's 1804 expedition to the 2014 uprising in Ferguson, American history has been made in St. Louis. And as Walter Johnson shows in this searing book, the city exemplifies how imperialism, racism, and capitalism have persistently entwined to corrupt the nation's past. St. Louis was a staging post for Indian removal and imperial expansion, and its wealth grew on the backs of its poor black residents, from slavery through redlining and urban renewal. But it was once also America's most radical city, home to anti-capitalist immigrants, the Civil War's first general emancipation, and the nation's first general strike -- a legacy of resistance that endures. A blistering history of a city's rise and decline, The Broken Heart of America will forever change how we think about the United States."--

Hispanic Heritage Month, running from September 15 to October 15, is a vibrant celebration of the history, culture, and contributions of Hispanic and Latino Americans. This month-long observance honors the rich tapestry of cultures that make up the Hispanic community, from music and art to historical achievements and social progress. Hispanic Heritage Month does not cover one single month but instead begins in the middle of September and ends in the middle of October.

Both significant and timely, Blackhood Against the Police Power addresses the punishment of "race" and the disavowal of sexual violence central to the contemporary "post-racial" culture of politics. Here the author asserts that the post-racial presents an antiblack animus that should be read as desiring the end of blackness and the black liberation movement's singular ethical claims. The book redefines policing as a sociohistorical process of implementing antiblackness and, in so doing, redefines racism as an act of sexual violence that produces the punishment of race. It smartly critiques the way leading antiracist discourse is frequently complicit with antiblackness and recalls the original 1960s conception of black studies as a corrective to the deficiencies in today's critical discourse on race and sex. The book explores these lines of inquiry to pinpoint how the history of racial slavery wraps itself in a new discourse of disavowal. In this way, Blackhood Against the Police Power responds to a range of texts, policies, practices, and representations complicit with the police power--from the Fourth Amendment and the movements to curtail stop-and-frisk policing and mass incarceration to popular culture treatments of blackness to the leading academic discourses on race and sex politics.

List of resources from the Prison Policy Initiative about the criminal justice system and COVID-19.

Viet Thanh Nguyen fled Vietnam as a child, escaping Saigon with his family the day before the capital city fell. They went to military bases in the Philippines and Guam, then lived in Pennsylvania for a few years before finally settling in San Jose, California, where he discovered the American dream was complicated. His literary work, most notably his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel,

"Collins views American society as being trapped in the so-called prisoner's dilemma. According to this classic piece of game theory, two prisoners whose interests would normally be aligned are put in a situation that compels them to betray their solidarity with each other. As Collins tells it, all of us are prisoners, and if we banded together we could create policies that would lead to a better, happier world. But those leading the Anti-Civil Rights Movement, such as Edward Blum, have repeatedly found ways to split coalitions-to pit marginalized groups against each others-whenever those coalitions have threatened the power of conservative elites to set the political and legal agenda. One of the central tools in the conservative arsenal has been affirmative action, which has had a long history of dividing the Asian American and Black American communities, going back to the anti-busing sentiment among Chinese Americans in San Francisco in the early 1970s. In 2013, the same year he helped gut the Voting Rights Act in the Shelby County v. Holder case, Blum created the Students for Fair Admissions and brought a suit against Harvard University for discriminating against Asian Americans-the latest in a long string of prisoner dilemmas designed to undermine social progress. Collins's groundbreaking work is a field guide to the personalities, funding, and dilemmas that characterize the war between the Civil Rights Movement and the Anti-Civil Rights Movement-between the forces represented, respectively, by Thurgood Marshall and the one who replaced him on the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas. Reading this book helps readers better understand the battles that have been fought in the past, but also where the next fight might take place, and what might be necessary in order to win"--

"A powerful and needed collection of essays by accomplished women writers on violence and injustice toward Black men. The catalyst for a national conversation, this book shines a new light on the dangers Black men face daily, and the emotional toll anti-Black violence takes on the women who love them, casting a vision for future activism"--

February marks the beginning of Black History Month, a time dedicated to recognizing and celebrating the profound contributions of African Americans throughout history. This annual observance serves as a crucial reminder of the struggles, triumphs, and enduring resilience of the Black community.

"Oregon is the second state to pass a bill banning police from using deceptive interrogation tactics following Illinois."

"Narratives written by enslaved Africans in America are few in number. Some are transformative, like that of Harriet Jacobs; others are lesser, like the brief one attributed to Harriet's brother, John S. Jacobs. The revelation, here, of a much longer, richer, and more radical version of John's story, is a major historical event. His work is all the more significant for having been written and published in Australia, outside the sanitizing and bowdlerizing influence of the American Abolitionist movement. Jacobs's full account is a startling and clear expression of the true thoughts, words, and wide-ranging experiences of a man once enslaved"--

We can live in a world beyond policing.

"In See Justice Done: The Problem of Law in the African American Literary Tradition, author Christopher Michael Brown argues that African American literature has profound and deliberate legal roots. Tracing this throughline from the eighteenth century to the present, Brown demonstrates that engaging with legal culture in its many forms-including its conventions, paradoxes, and contradictions-is paramount to understanding Black writing. Brown begins by examining petitions submitted by free and enslaved Blacks to colonial and early republic legislatures. A virtually unexplored archive, these petitions aimed to demonstrate the autonomy and competence of their authors. Brown also examines early slave autobiographies such as Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative and Mary Prince's History, which were both written in the form of legal petitions. These works invoke scenes of Black competence and of Black madness, repeatedly and simultaneously. Early Black writings reflect how a Black Atlantic world, organized by slavery, refused to acknowledge Black competence. By including scenes of Black madness, these narratives critique the violence of the law and predict the failure of future legal counterparts, such as Plessy v. Ferguson, to remedy injustice. Later chapters examine the works of more contemporary writers, such as Sutton E. Griggs, George Schuyler, Toni Morrison, and Edward P. Jones, and explore varied topics from American exceptionalism to the legal trope of "colorblindness." In chronicling these interactions with jurisprudential logics, See Justice Done reveals the tensions between US law and Black experiences of both its possibilities and its perils"--

We are an uprising of rebellious youth fighting for our freedom. We are organizers shaping our collective destinies. We are the next generation of revolutionaries.