🤔 I often post about how many innocent Black folk (millions) spend up to 2 years in jail, just because they can't afford bail. About how the less likely you are to be a criminal or in a gang, the more likely you are to experience prison violence. About how I am not hard. I'm soft as a kitten's belly! And yet 15 minutes in a cell with me, and I could have you confessing to crimes you didn't commit, just to get out of jail and away from me.
But Chauvin gets stabbed, and now y'all wanna talk? BFR.
I just got done helping another 100% innocent Black friend in NYC avoid being charged with a felony. That charge could have had him in Rikers for up to 2 years pre-trial. He could have lost his job, house, credit score, savings, his relationship, etc. A lot of people get stabbed in Rikers.
How I helped: Advice. Lawyer. Covered retainer.
But y'all want to talk about Chauvin? That's what makes you finally want to talk about cruel and unusual punishment, and violence in the prison system?
BFR
If you want to talk about violence in the prison system, what we can do to reduce it, and how it is morally reprehensible for prosecutors to use that violence as a way to get Black people to confess to crimes that everyone knows that they did not commit? Then I'm with you. 👍🏿
But if you want to talk specifically about how we can keep Derek Chauvin safe? How we can keep the inhumane, brutal prison system for innocent Black folk, but protect him from it? Miss me with that. Talk to somebody else.
Kalief Browder was 100% innocent. He was a good student and had never been arrested. He was accused of stealing a backpack, even though no backpack was found on him or anywhere near him when he was arrested. There was literally zero evidence. But they sent him to Rikers for 3 years, hoping he would confess to something that everyone knew he didn't do. He never confessed. And it broke him.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kv6gSl4JcFA
If he had paid the $3,000 for bail, the prosecutors would have dropped the case.
The violence in the prison system is necessary to get Black people to confess to crimes that they did not commit.
Without extreme prison violence, and without the injustice of cash bail, poor Black people would have a better chance of not being wrongfully convicted. Tens of millions of lives would be positively impacted. The United States would become a less racist place!
That's the problem that we should be addressing. Not "How do we keep the evil system, but help Chauvin not get stabbed?"
@mekkaokereke hell no. Chauvin is a monster.
Keeping the innocent out of prison, as you are: 🤜🤛
@arclight @mekkaokereke everybody in a policed community, whether it's the 'hood (read: ghetto, as in "government program to concentrate and isolate a population"), a trailer park, or a shack where migrant workers and their families eke out an existence, gets daily demonstrations of the nature and praxis of policing.
It's not just US policing that's this way. It's policing per se.
During the late 1980's, a commissioner of the police in one UK city, said in a radio interview that the job of the police is not justice, but population control.
It was quietly swept under the rug.
Threatening suspects with "what could happen to them" in jail, and putting first-timers in cells with known violent offenders or intimidating snitches, are forms of stochastic terrorism.
♥️
There are a number of local bail funds that do great work. There are also a few nationwide ones:
https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/111472364760273310
But better than bail funds, is eliminating cash bail. Whether or not you are kept in jail pre-trial or not, shouldn't be based on how much money you have. It should be based on how much risk you present to the community (which is still open to bias, but much less).
So we should support progressive DAs over carceral ones.
@[email protected] Two organizations that I recommend: https://bailproject.org Pays bail for people, which reduces innocent people pleading guilty, among other benefits. https://innocenceproject.org Gets innocent people out of jail. But two of the best things that you can do are free! 1) Support reform DAs. With your votes and your words. Make the bail project irrelevant! 2) Observe court proceedings! Many places will allow you to observe court proceedings online.
@mekkaokereke Maybe I am dumb or cynical, but I am at this point basically willing to entertain almost anything to make this system less horrible for everyone, which would in this case have helped the guy. Literally just want to move the needle a little bit, since I feel like I am taking to a wall with an implicit assumption of well if he didn't do anything why would the cops have wanted to/be detained/etc.
I do suspect it's willful ignorance from the masses, tho, only malicious from cops/AGs.
I call it pleading up. Faced with a long prison sentence, people will plead guilty to a lesser charge even when they are innocent.
Aren't judges supposed to question everyone who pleads guilty to make sure they are not pleading guilty when they aren't guilty?
Would it be so bad if a judge refused to accept a plea deal and assured the accused he would not receive a severe sentence just because he went to trial?
The person that takes the deal is forced to lie.
mekka okereke 
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