Mifflin W. Gibbs

 


 

 
Florida's Justice:
Parceled out By Race
  

Florida's justice was at work again, and a strange justice it is. Several editions back, Gibbs reported on a Florida judge who refused to sentence a White two-time felon to prison because he would probably be the target of sexual rape. That was an uncommon judicial compassionate. The problem with that compassion is the disparity of that compassion for all felons being sentenced, especially Black felons.

That compassion was nowhere in sight when two judges sentenced two nonwhite juvenile offenders to life in prison without the possibility of parole. One juvenile was only 13-years old at the time his offense and 14-years old at sentencing; the other offender was 15-years old. 

Both offenses were very egregious--murders. But both offenders were children at an age where they had not even formed their personalities, and a sentence of life without parole does not consider any possibility of reform or rehabilitation. Second, these juveniles were not repeat offenders. They were children, and, yes, their victims were children as well, but no amount of punishment will bring the victims back, yet some amount of compassion may have allowed for redemption of the offenders.

Children have this incredible ability to rebound and change. It seems to be adults who are stout in their ways and seemingly cannot or won't change.

The White, two-time felon was not a child, he was an adult, yet the judge had compassion on him because he was "white and thin and would probably be the sexual prey of some convict in prison." Somehow, there is something deadly wrong with this reasoning when it does not apply to the 14 and 15 year olds who will also be the sexual prey for some convicts in the prison system.

If the compassionate logic works for one, it should work for all. Again, we cannot condone the actions these boys committed. But they are children, and who knows what they could have become. But the argument of some who would justify this specific logic of compassion as merely compassion and not discrimination is this: This is not systemic because the judges are individuals and their rulings are not based on any pattern but peculiar to their courts. 

Whereas there seems to be no pattern or relatedness to the compassionate "White and thin" judgment of a two-term felon and the two minority children who were sentenced without the benefit of a compassionate judge, this lack of a pattern and unrelatedness is repeated and practiced systematically throughout this nation so that there is a vast disparity of the number of Black and minority inmates  in the prisons to those of Whites. 

Let the white light of logic practiced by one Florida judge be practiced by all and for all--Black and White equally. Otherwise, compassion parceled out by race becomes the evil of White American racism regardless of its nametag. []