13319: This Week in Haiti 20:29 10/2/2002 (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

"This Week in Haiti" is the English section of HAITI PROGRES
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                           HAITI PROGRES
              "Le journal qui offre une alternative"

                      * THIS WEEK IN HAITI *

                        October 2 - 8, 2002
                          Vol. 20, No. 29

WHEELING AND DEALING  IN THE LOUIMA CASE:
JUSTICE COMPROMISED IS JUSTICE DENIED
by Daniel Simidor

The latest settlement in the Louima case - the Schwarz compromise
- tells us a great deal about how the U.S. justice system
operates, and about how our own community works and doesn't work

The Decision

Charles Schwarz is the policeman who was indicted for assisting
fellow officer Justin Volpe in sodomizing Abner Louima with a
broomstick in Brooklyn's 70th Precinct station-house on Aug. 9,
1997. The desk sergeant and another policeman on duty that night,
Eric Turesky, testified they saw Schwarz escorting Louima toward
the bathroom where Volpe assaulted him. Another sergeant and a
secretary in a nearby office also saw Schwarz walking a black man
down the hall. Schwarz, understandably, claimed he was not even
inside the building when the deed was done, but his alibi was
knocked down by his own partner, Thomas Wiese. The "blue wall of
silence" had cracked under intense community pressure.

Volpe, after his conviction, tried to muddy things up by implying
that Wiese, not Schwarz, was his accomplice in the bathroom. But
this is not a complicated case. Schwarz was convicted once for
violating Abner Louima's civil rights, and a second time for
obstruction of justice and perjury. He was sentenced to five
years in jail.

After serving 33 months of his sentence, a federal court of
appeals led by Judge John Walker, a cousin of George W. Bush,
overturned Schwarz's sentence, presumably because his lawyer had
a conflict of interest in representing him. A third trial ended
in July with a hung jury, because a lone juror found reasonable
doubt in Schwarz's favor. A fourth trial was scheduled to start
last week, when a deal was struck between Schwarz's lawyers and
the U.S. prosecutor's office. Schwarz will now spend a maximum of
five years in jail, instead of the 15 years he faced if
convicted.

"What happened on Saturday night," writes Newsday columnist Jimmy
Breslin, "was that a new United States attorney in Brooklyn,
Roslynn R. Mauskopf, a white, right-wing Republican whose
background suggests a house closing in Troy, either used her own
prejudice or took directions from above to settle the case." Part
of the agreement is a five-year gag order to keep everybody
involved in the case from speaking out. "This case started as a
civil rights case and it ends as a suppression of free speech,"
concludes Breslin.

Justice Denied

During a Haitian affairs special program in July on Pacifica
Radio's WBAI in New York, I made the point that a guilty verdict
against Schwarz was almost impossible, because the notion that
the police would conspire to violate the rights of a black
immigrant was too risky for the State. A single cop who breaks
the law can be held accountable if there is a sufficient outcry
in the streets or in the media. But such cases are always
portrayed as an aberration.

Abner Louima was led into the 70th Precinct with his clothes on
and without any major trauma, even though he had been roughed up
on the way there. That two policemen walked this handcuffed man
to a precinct bathroom; that they raped him with a stick and then
confined him, bleeding, in a holding pen for hours; that the
wounded man was then taken to a hospital and shackled to a bed;
that his injury was ascribed to rough sex in a Haitian gay bar;
that Volpe had bragged openly after torturing Louima that he had
"to break a man," all this speaks of a major cover-up, up and
down the chain of command in that precinct. For the State to
concede that the police conspired to cover up such a revolting
crime would be to admit that something is seriously wrong with
how the police operate. It would mean that the police have to be
brought under control.

You may ask why reining in the police is not deemed desirable by
the State. Police behavior in wealthy and white suburban areas is
certainly more restrained. There, the police's role is to
protect. But the role assigned to the police force in working
class neighborhoods and in communities of color across the United
States calls for a more threatening and repressive code of
conduct. Here the police's role is to use force, to contain, to
repress. Here it actually helps that the men on the force are
prone to violence or hate minorities.

And if, as it happens every so often, they shoot an innocent man
for talking back (Patrick Dorismond) or reaching for his wallet
(Amadou Diallo), if they get caught beating a man on the ground
like a bunch of wild thugs (Rodney King), it is the price of the
ticket for holding the line, for maintaining the status quo
between rich and poor that exists in the U.S.. Lax prosecution,
the proverbial "blue wall of silence," middle-class acquiescence,
and a whitewashing media suffice to guarantee impunity, except in
the most extreme cases.

The Community

The Haitian community is extremely vulnerable to institutional
misconduct. The young who bear the brunt of police violence are
often out partying. Collectively, we are far too preoccupied with
putting bread on the table and staying out of trouble to pay
close attention to what the system is doing to us.

Our leadership structure is inadequate. The gospel of submission
preached by the Christian churches sets the community up for all
kinds of abuse. Four out of five of the Haitian tabloids and
virtually all the radio and television programs available to the
Haitian diaspora in the United States are proudly subservient to
the police.

The established rights groups and so-called advocacy groups, like
the Haitian-American Alliance, typically pitch for funds from
City Hall and even from the police to set up sensitivity
workshops to teach Haitians proper obedience to the police! One
so-called leader, Jean-Claude Compas, unilaterally decreed a
moratorium on Haitian street protests, in late August 1997, I
suppose as a sign of responsible leadership in response to
Giuliani, who had allowed his group to lead a march to City Hall
across the Brooklyn Bridge. With leaders like these . . .

As for the Left, there is a feeling in the Haitian community that
progressive voices like this newspaper are often exaggerating or
selling wolf tickets to scare people into action. Then something
really horrible happens, and everybody is up in arms. But our
spontaneous outbursts seldom bring relief, and we delude
ourselves into thinking that blowing off steam, or that two or
three people calling themselves an organization, is the same
thing as effectively fighting for change. Meanwhile, the law of
diminishing returns has dampened our sense of outrage, so much so
that we barely reacted as a community to the police killing of
young Gregory Louisgène earlier this year in Brooklyn (see Haïti
Progrès, Vol. 19, No. 45, 1/23/2002).

We need to do better. We need to do more. For starters, people in
the community need to rally to the kind of progressive leadership
they know will not sell them out. But the progressive groups,
too, must grow up, must get down to the serious business of
organizing, and, above all else, must leave their hangups and
petty bickering behind.

All articles copyrighted Haiti Progres, Inc. REPRINTS ENCOURAGED.
Please credit Haiti Progres.

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