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MAY 1, 1997 AUGUSTA FOCUS
National Commentary
TO BE EQUAL By Hugh B. Price
Justice denied as black
motorist’s killers go free
he mystifying decision Tuesday
by ajudge of the Allegheny Court
of Common Pleas to halt the
retrial of two suburban Pitts
burgh police officers charged
with causing the death of a black motor
ist is a matter of justice being delayed.
It is also further evidence that correct
ing the serious flaws in the relationship
between the police and the criminal jus
tice system and the Hispanic-American
and African-American citizens is a mat
ter of the greatest natioal urgency.
Gammage, 31, a Syracuse, N.Y. busi
nessman, was in the Pittsburgh area
visiting relatives when a white police
officer on lone patrol pulled him over on
a seemingly routine traffic stop. The of
ficer later said that Gammage had not
been speeding, but had been driving er
ratically. Within moments, a struggle
had erupted and, after four other white
police officersarrived on the scene, Jonny
Gammage lay dead. -
According to the sworn testimony of
both the county coroner and a physician
hired by the Gammage family to conduct
an autopsy, Gammage died from posi
tional asphyxia due to a compression of
the neck and chest. That means that the
air was literally squeezed out of him as he
lay face down on the street.
A coroner’s jury, which heard the evi
dence, recommended in late 1995 that
five police officers be charged with homi
cide. However, the county District Attor
ney decided to charge only three of the
five officersin connection with thedeath.
One of the police officers he did not charge
became a key prosecution witness in the
two trials, already held, concerning the
case. The other has played no further
role in the controversy.
Ultimately, the three officers were
charged with involuntary manslaughter,
and their cases assigned to Common Pleas
Court Judge David R. Cashman. Judge
Cashman ordered two trials for three
officers before juries 'picked from two
counties outside Pittsburgh’s jurisdic
tion and brought to the city.
One of the police officers was acquitted
of the charges last fall by an all-white
jury. The trial of the other two officers
ended in a mistrial. Their attorneys then
asked the judge to rule that, becaase the
District Attorney had not charged all five
police officersinvolved with criminal con
duct, the two officers were the victims of
selective prosecution. Judge Cashman’s
ruling, last Thursday, agreed with that
assertion.
We make no claim to be experts in the
legal theory of selective prosecution. But
we do note that legal experts have ex
pressed astonishment at the ruling, point
ing out that prosecutors have tradition
ally had very broad discretion in deciding
who to charge with crimes and what
crimes to charge them with.
The District Attorney, Bob Colville,
said he will appeal Judge Cashman’s rul
ing, and Pittsburgh Mayor Tom Murphy
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Publisher
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The death of Jonny E.
Gammage is just one of
a series of instances in
which African-American
and Hispanic-American
men have met their
death under controver
sial circumstances while
in police custody.
immediately urged U.S. Attorney Gen
eral Janet Reno to press with greater
urgency the federal investigation of
whethe: the officers committed federal
civil rights violations against Gammage,
We second the responsible actions of|
these public officials. And we applaud the
work of those citizens and community
organizations in the Pittsburgh area,
including our Urban League affiliate and
its president, Esther L. Bush, who have
been stalwart in their quest for justice in
this tragedy. -
The death of Jonny E. Gammage is just
one of a series of instances in which
African-American and Hispanic-Ameri
can men have met their death under
controversial circumstances while in
policy custody. It has happened too often
— and with conclusions which have not
served justice well — to be tolerated.
Last November, when the all-whitejury
acquitted one of the police officers in
volved in the death of Jonny Gammage,
we urged President Clinton to lead a
national campaign to restore the trust
and respect between the nation’s police
and the minority citizens they are sworn
to serve.
“We said that a presidential summit on
the issue, with a cross-section of police
chiefs and officers, police unions, and
civil rights and community leaders, could
provoke the intensive examination of
what’s wrong and what needs to be done
by everyone to reduce the tensions and
improve police-community relations.
With the incidents of the last several
years still resounding, can anyone doubt
that the nation has already reached the
point of crisis in urban law enforcement,
a crisis which affects every part of the
criminal justice system? Let them go to
Pittsburgh and speak to Esther Bush,
who said, speaking of the Cashman rul
ing, “The truly f.ightening thing is that
many people (in the black community
there) are not surprised by it. They don’t
have faith that justice will be done in this
matter.”
Is that a belief we want to fester and
spread? America’s leadership needs to
indicate to all its citizens that it has no
tolerance for the delay of justice.
Opinion
ALONG THE COLOR LINE By Dr. Manning Marable
Public vs. private debate continues
he central issue which defines
American politics today — as
well as the future politics of the
21st century — is the conflict
between the public vs. the pri
vate. Should we utilize the government
as a means to address our major social
and economic problems? Or should we
emphasize market-based initiatives, the
private sector, to resolve issues like un
employment and poverty? Nearly every
significant policy debate since the elec
tion of Ronald Reagan in 1980 has come
down to this question: should govern
ment or the corporations be most power
ful in determining the future of the coun
try?
The list of examples illustrating the
public sector vs. private sector is virtu
ally endless. In health care, for instance,
Clinton’s 1994 proposal for managed
health care tried to combine limited gov
ernment mandates with privately-run,
health provider corporations. Instead of
pushing vigorously for the single-payer,
comprehensive healthcare system we
need, Clinton tried to please private sec
tor interests and failed.
In public education, a debate is cur
rently waging over the issue of vouchers,
and whether parents should be subsi
dized to send their children to private
schools. In public colleges, cutbacks in
state and local funding has forced higher
tuitions and fees, reducing the access of
many racial minorities and working
people to higher education.
In the areas of public housing and
homelessness, stateand city governments
are aggressively cutting back funds. The
federal government’s public housing ini
CIVIL RIGHTS JOURNAL By Bernice Powell Jackson
South Africa deserves our support
first went to South Africa in 1982,
I think. I remember getting off the
plane and seeing a soldier at the
foot of the steps with an M-2 rifle
on his shoulder. I remember visit
ing the homelands where millions of
black South Africans had been forcibly
relocated. I remember the Pass Courts
where millions were jailed for visiting
their families without the government’s
permission. I remember talking with
school children and domestic workers
and church folks who were trying to
survive in an almost unsurvivable situ
ation. I remember the constant knot in
the pit of my stomach which was there
from the moment I landed until the
moment I took off. I remember the old
South Africa. -
But when I visited the new South
Africa last month, I saw something
different and I felt something differ
ent. I saw that nation’s Parliament at
work—a’' new interracial, representa
tive government, whose speaker is an
Indian woman and whose deputy is a
black woman. I saw black immigration
officers at the airport and blacks sit
ting in restaurants and hotel lobbies.
The new South Africa feels different
as well. Gone is the sense of the mili
tary state. Gone is the prison at Robben
Island. In its place is a new tourist
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BY WASSERMAN FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE
tiatives have been somewhat better dur
ing Clinton’s administration than under
Reagan and Bush. Yet increasingly, poli
ticians argue that government needs to
get out of the business of building and
managing public housing, and that the
private market should determine the
quality and availability of housing.
Regarding issues of personal safety,
privatization has meant the growth of
the private security guard industry. To
dayinthe U.S., there are 1.5 million full
time and part-time security guards —
compared to only 550,000 police officers.
Corporations, private country clubs, and
exclusive planned communities are
guarded by private security personnel.
Increasingly, matters of law enforcement
are moving away from the public sector,
where at least civilian review boards and
similar agencies provide a check against
police misconduct.
In the areas of culture, some of the
fiercest battles between public vs. pri
vate interests have been waged: efforts
to destroy the National Endowment for
the Humanities, the National Endow
ment for the Arts, and public television;
the reductions in funding for public mu
seums, parks and recreational facilities,
and cultural education programs for chil
drenand adults. We can see thisdestruc
tive process by focusing on public librar
ies. Severe reductions in staff and fund
ing have crippled public library services
in virtually every major American city.
Increasingly, large corporate bookstore
chains have taken the place of public
libraries — except that consumers can
only have legitimate access if they have
the money to purchase books. In the
attraction. Gone is the feeling of evil in
the air — a physical feeling that I often
felt. I no longer felt as if I were in the
presence of evil — a presence that I
could touch like static electricity. Gone
is the demeanor of subservience which
most blacks had been forced to adopt—
there’s a new straightening of the back
and new kind of step in the walk.
It’s a new day in a new South Africa.
But it is a new South Africa which is
still forced to deal with some of the old
problems. Old problems like the crimes
of the old apartheid regime, including
false arrests, police brutality, torture,
and even murder. Old problems like
the millions of black South Africans
still living in shacks, still without
plumbing or electricity or the millions
still unemployed.
Then there is the new problem of
crime. During the apartheid regime,
street crimes were few due to the pres
ence of the military force on the streets
and the fact that movements of people
were tightly constrained by law. The
new South Africa finds, however, that
it is facing the crime problems of many
large cities of the world where there is
high unemployment but in a context
where the police are inadequately
trained for dealing with street crime.
market economy, both knowledge and.’
beauty are always for sale. The value of
everything is what price it bears in the
marketplace. . 3
Of course, the most devastating '
struggles between the public vs. private '
sectors have been about jobs. The Reagan
Republicans and “Contract With
America” ultrarightists declare that gov- '
ernment has no moral responsibility to
create jobs for the unemployed, to pro- "
vide vocational training and social ser
vices for the indigent. The pcor must'
learn to fend for themselves. A
The trends toward commercialization
and privatization now impact the small
est matters of daily life. For example, the
Federal Express branch office in my
Manhattan neighborhood refuses to ac
cept cash as payment — only credit cards.
Many commercial establishments now
prefer payment by credit cards or bank
debit cards. Millions of poor people are !
already denied credit at banks, and in-»
creasingly, in the future will be refused
access to a whole range of goods and.!
services. )
Progressive politics must put the wel
fare of people ahead of the corporations™
and personal profit. That’s why the
struggle to maintain and to expand pub
lic institutions and public spaces is cen- "
tral to the achievement of a more demo- -
cratic society. g
Dr. Manning Marable is professor of
history and director of the Institute for
Research in African-American Studies,
Columbia University, New York City.
“Along the Color Line” appears in over:
300 publications throughoutthe U.S.and
internationally. i
Or there is the new problem of how to
adequately educate and train millions
who have been educated in a system
whose foundation was built upon the
belief that blacks should only be edu-*
cated to be servants or mine workers or
mail room attendants. Or how to train ,
the millions of unemployed in skills
which can lead to viable jobs in the
electronic age in which we live.
There is a new spirit in the new '
South Africa. There is a sense that "
right can triumph over might. There is”
a sense that reconciliation can be’
achieved by repentance and forgive
ness. There is a sense that all South”
Africans will have adequate housing’
and food and education and flourishing '
communities. There is a sense and a’
commitment that South African whites
and blacks and coloreds and Indians
can all live together and live well.
But the clash of the old and the new
means that those of us on the outside °
cannot abandon South Africa now.
Those of us who worked so hard to see
the birth of the new South Africa, can
not abandon the baby now. We must
find ways to help them provide hous
ing. We must find ways to help them"
provide education. We even must find !
ways to help them fight street crime. -