Advocates, Fired Cop, Unnecessary Death and AOT Controversy

When the 14 year-old old boy came home from school and found his mother on the floor badly beaten and unconscious, he decided to do something. He took a pistol from a drawer, marched into his mother’s bedroom where his drunken step-father had passed out on the bed, and fired point blank into the man’s skull killing him. Arrested and charged as an adult, the youth was taken to an adult  jail to await trial.

The boy had been there only three days when defense attorney Bryan Stevenson met him. He was so traumatized that he could not answer any of the lawyer’s questions. He’d been repeatedly sexually assaulted — so many times in that three day period in jail that he’d lost count of how many men had abused him. All the boy did for two hours was sob as Stevenson held him.  

This tragic story was one of several that Bryan Stevenson described in an impassioned speech that he gave last week during an Advanced Judiciary Academy conference at the University of Illinois in Champaign/Urbana. I’ve written about Bryan before on my blog. He’s an inspirational advocate.

Bryan and I were invited to speak to the Illinois judges about how wealth and poverty influence our criminal justice system. We’d been invited to lecture because of my book, CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE: Death, Life and Justice in a Southern Town.  For those of you who might not have read it, CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE  is a true story about the murder of a popular, white teenager in the Alabama town that inspired the novel, TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD.  A poor, uneducated,  black man named Walter “Johnny D.” McMillian was convicted of the killing which happened inside a dry cleaners on a busy Saturday morning. McMillian was sentenced to death after two witnesses testified that they’d seen his truck parked outside the cleaners at the time of the murder and another witness claimed he actually see McMillian standing over the dead girl during a robbery.  It seemed as if McMillian had been caught red handed.

But after Stevenson began investigating the case, a different picture emerged. Both witnesses who’d claimed to have seen the truck recanted their stories. Both had received reward money in return for testifying. The eyewitness who swore that McMillian had murdered the girl was proven to be a liar. Even worse, Stevenson discovered that the prosecution had hidden crucial evidence that proved McMillian was innocent. During the murder, he had been at his home miles away helping host a fish fry. Two law enforcement officers had stopped there that day but had failed to come forward to substantiate his alibi. Put simply, McMillian had been framed.

Although Bryan proved McMillian was innocent, Alabama officials refused to free him. It took a 60 Minutes segment about the case to shame local and state officials into releasing an innocent black man from death row.

I spoke first at last week’s conference and described the murder and investigation. Bryan spoke after me about the case but quickly moved to such broader issues as the number of persons with mental illnesses now being incarcerated and his latest campaign to stop pre-teens and teenagers under age fifteen from being charged as adults when they commit crimes. Many of these children are sentenced to life in prison. His work as the executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative prompted the judges in the audience to do something that Judge Susan Hutchinson, who helped organize the academy, said she’d never witnessed  before.

They gave him a standing ovation.

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Outpouring of Frustration, What’s Next?

I have been inundated this week with emails, mostly from parents and family members, expressing frustration and anger about our broken mental health care system. 

Here is a sampling:

*You touched my heart today on Sunday’s CNN show. I tried to get my son help over and over. He is now in prison. .. What now? No education, no job, a criminal record….no help.

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A Mental Health Quiz

Eleven Questions about Mental Health  

           Question one:  A recent president appointed a commission to study mental illness. Critics immediately attacked that commission and recruited a celebrity to blast it. What president appointed The President’s New Freedom Commission on Mental Health: Achieving the Promise: Transforming Mental Health Care in America and who was the celebrity who criticized it? 

  1. President George H.W. Bush and Tom Cruise
  2. President Bill Clinton and John Travolta
  3. President George W. Bush and Patch Adams
  4. President George W. Bush and Britney Spears 

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Playing Pete Earley and a Supreme Court Justice

A funny thing happened recently  when a man approached me after I gave a speech and said: “Hi, I’m Pete Earley.”  

What should we do when there is a shooting?

I had planned to write today about my trip out of the snow-bound Washington D.C. area to Los Angeles where I toured Skid Row and the Twin Towers, which is the nickname for the city jail. As many of you know, the jail is the largest public mental institution in the U.S.

However, I decided to wait until Monday to post that account because of the police shooting here in Fairfax, Va.  that put Ian Smith, a person with mental illness, into the hospital in critical condition.

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Pill Pushers versus Dedicated Doctors

Mike’s first breakdown happened in 2001 and since then he has been seen by nine different psychiatrists – some private, some in emergency rooms, some in community treatment programs. As best as I can tell, only two of them – that’s right two of them – have bothered to learn anything more about him than his name and symptoms.
I remember confronting one of Mike’s first doctors when I realized that he had only spent ten minutes talking to my son and had no family or medical history to review. The psychiatrist explained that he didn’t need to know any of Mike’s past information, only the names of medications that Mike had and was taking.  He explained that his job was to render a correct  diagnosis and then prescribe the appropriate medication. After that, it was up to a social worker to deal with Mike.
I was frustrated and angry.