Attorney Leopold Summary

Ms. Kemba Smith is a mother, wife, domestic abuse survivor, former incarcerated prisoner, author, a motivator speaker and an advocate. In her book, Poster Child, The Story Kemba Smith Story, she shares her story of how making poor choices blinded by love and devotion can have long-term consequences. Ms. Smith also knows that there is “lesson in each experience in life and she embraced her experience, learned from it and now using that experience to teach others.” True to her promise she graduated from Virginia Union University, finished year as a law student at Howard University. She became an advocate for criminal justice and prison reform, and re-entry programs.

Thurgood Marshall: The Writer. Print. Using Marx, Weber, Deleuze. Hemmingway discusses the legal texts of the Author Thurgood Marshall as a grand jurist, educated scholar, and legal practitioner. The authors highlight and review Thurgood Marshall’s upbringing in education.

In his novel, Grisham argues that these two worlds may not be as mutually exclusive as perceived. The Rooster Bar explores for-profit law schools and the insurmountable

Eventually down the road, Wilbert has lectured at universities, seminars, national and international conferences, and at meetings of organizations for the reform of the criminal justice system and against the death penalty. He also has been a consultant to both federal and state capital defense teams on dozens of cases around the country. Lastly, he also become an author writing about the American criminal justice system and the prison system. In the final analysis, from Wilbert Rideau becoming a strong positive representative to the lack of empathy that Vincent Simmons received, even though his case seemed a bit open and shut, to Eugene ‘Bishop’ Tannehill making a full turn around becoming a preacher to his once fellow inmates.

Institutional racism is inevitable in the United States. Institutional racism is constantly occurring, whether it be in the work force, schools, or the criminal justice system. The color of one’s skin is a determining factor for his success in a company, and whether or not he ends up in the court systems, and for how long. Although laws such as the Thirteenth Amendment, Fourteenth Amendment, and Fifteenth Amendment have been put in place to avoid racism in America and give black people equal rights, institutional racism is still holding African Americans back.

Issues of Social and Economic Justice Throughout my experience in the Panhandle Promise Project, I had the opportunity to closely examine the injustice many of the clients experience based on their race, economic status, or in the criminal justice system. Since the starting of America’s war on drugs longer sentencing for drug offences that in violent crimes, there has been an increase of the number of minorities who are currently in prison (Wormer, Kaplan, and Juby (2012). For the children having a parent incarcerated affects them in several different ways, such as having a higher risk of being place in foster care (Andersen and Wildeman, 2014) , poor school performance (Eddy et al., 2014), food insecurity (Turney, 2014c), antisocial behavioral problems (Jarjoura et al., 2011f). For women who have been release from prison new barriers limit the assistance they will received, the ineligibility for food stamps (Travis, 2002), and in some cases the loss of their children custody (Welsh, 2014b).

On my way back to Miami, waiting for my flight at La Guardia Airport in New York and was eager to board my plane, I decided to watch the nearby television to pass time. That’s when I learned about who Michael Brown was. He was an unarmed black teenager, shot and killed by Darren Wilson, a white police officer, in Ferguson, Mo., a suburb of St. Louis. On the TV screen were countless vivid images of the scene of Brown’s death and almost instantly it became ground zero for local outrage. Devastated to hear that yet another another teenage boy was killed by law enforcement, it was clear to me that there was an urgent need for justice in the US.

The intention of my research is to expose the racist tactics in the criminal justice system that have been camouflaged. I am prepared to explain how racism contributes to the vast number of incarcerated African Americans, and other minorities. The criminal justice system has created and perpetuated racial hierarchy in the United States, and has done so throughout history. I propose the question: Are minorities being targeted within the Criminal Justice System? African Americans are criminalized and targeted because of their skin color, and it is not fair.

It became clear that tragedy was not unique to my family. There are thousands of other Black American families that deal with the pain of having a loved one in our criminal justice system, mostly for nonviolent crimes. From this academic pursuit, I developed a lens of consciousness that allows me to see the manifestations of racism in our legal

Racial and ethnicity discrimination in the justice system have been around since the beginning of this country against “Negroid” . Writing this research paper brings me back to the first book I ever read; “The Emmett Till Story;” which should be a reminder how awful our justice system can be. The problem we are having today in America is that Emmett Till’s story is still going on in 2017. The story goes like this per emmetttillmurder.com “While visiting family in Money, Mississippi, 14-year-old Emmett Till, an African American from Chicago, is brutally murdered for flirting with a white woman four days earlier.” Now this is we their system have fail, and continued to nose-dive the Negroid around in America.

In Just Mercy, author Bryan Stevenson recounts his time as a lawyer in Alabama during a time when the reality of racism in America was being seen for what it truly is; unjust and unfair. One of the connections Stevenson draws is that of slavery and the ties it has to today’s criminal justice system. In a study by the National Academic Press, it was estimated that in 1972, 161 U.S. residents were incarcerated in prisons/jails per 100,000 population; by 2007, that rate had more than quintupled to a peak of 767 per 100,000 (Jeremy Travis, 2014, p.33). In 2014, when Stevenson’s memoir was published, the number of those incarcerated estimated around 1.56 million— 58 percent of those identified as either Latino or Black (Carson, 2014).

Perpetuation of issues such as these in the law can be changed with research and the implementation of new policies that serve to address the underlying causes of these issues, which is racial inequality and the continued oppression of people of color in the United States. I plan to research the psychology of oppression and its effects on government and society in graduate school, and work to combat these effects as a clinical psychologist and community change agent. The overall structure of oppression, which has made itself known as I investigate the root causes of more common social issues such as mass incarceration and food deserts, is created and perpetuated through government and public policy, regardless of the emergence of national social awareness of issues such as inequality, economic disparity, and social injustice. I believe that inequality can be changed one step-or one policy-at a time, and I plan to help with this as I examine the different forms of oppression on people of color at both a national and international level and work to lessen its force. Through non-government organizations such as the Marshall Project or the American Civil Liberties Union, I wish to add my knowledge of social science to the ongoing effort for equal civil rights for all citizens.

The criminal system operates on a hierarchy of individual liability over the demand and societal pressure”. By routinization of unequal protection from the legal system, black people are more vulnerable to be victimized by

Imperialism, a word that has been thrown here and there for the past century. It means for a country to dominate another country through political, cultural, or military means. Sometimes countries such as Belgium will induce fear through actions such as whipping or forcing labor into the citizens of another country just to gain power over that country. The primary motive of imperialism was nationalist domination, where one nation gains power over another.

The law is an intriguing concept, evolving from society’s originalities and moral perspectives. By participating in the legal system, we may endeavour to formulate a link between our own unique beliefs and the world in which we live. Evidently, a just sense of legality is a potent prerequisite for change, enabling society to continue its quest for universal equality and justice. Aristotle once stated that "even when laws have been written down, they ought not to remain unaltered".