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"We affirm the judgment of the district court denying Poindexter's motion for postconviction relief," meaning that to be Black in America grants you none.
In the 1980s, Nebraska Chief Supreme Court Justice Norman Krivosha commissioned a study of the state's judicial fairness that concluded it was equitable with one exception - race. People of color were more likely to be arrested, indicted, convicted, and given longer sentences than whites, including the death penalty for capital offenses. It's no surprise that Nebraska's 3% black population comprises over 40% of its inmates, and the same disparity holds nationally.
Blacks make up around 12.4% of the population, but almost half of those incarcerated. Around 50% of them are for non-violent offenses, and about half of those are drug related. In 2000, Human Rights Watch reported that in one-third of the states, 75% of all drug related offenders were black. In Illinois, it was 89%. Shockingly, with less than 5% of the world's population, America has almost one-fouth of its prisoners, by far the largest total at around 2.4 million, growing at about 1,000 per week, mostly affecting blacks and hispanics.
It's no wonder that we Langa and Poindexter couldn't reopen their case despite later FBI documents (released in 1978) showing police and the Bureau collaborated to suppress exculpatory evidence to convict two innocent men. Jack Swanson, the chief detective in charge of the investigation, told the BBC why:
"I think we did the right thing at the time because the Black Panther Party....completely disappeared from Omaha after we got the two main players." In other words, neutralize the leadership and the organization dies.
Yet former Nebraska Governor Frank Morrison (1961 - 1967, who with Thomas Kenney represented Poindexter as a public defender) believed the men:
-- "were convicted for their rhetoric, not for any crime they committed....The only thing these fellas did was try to combat all the racial discrimination of the time the wrong way....They weren't convicted of murder."
It was for their activism and prominence to stifle dissent, keep them imprisoned to assure it, and continue a long tradition of defiling due process and judicial fairness for people of color, the poor, and disadvantaged in a democracy for the privileged alone, as virulent under Obama as earlier.
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