Police Courts in New York
By: Alton Maddox,
AmNews
When you understand and speak out against New York’s judicial system, you better be prepared to duck for cover. This is like a medical doctor speaking out against unsanitary conditions in a hospital’s emergency room. You may end up losing your hospital privileges. “He who pays the piper calls the tune.”
On July 4, Bush 43 told a group at Monticello, in Virginia, who were taking the oath of citizenship that, “we believe in free speech.” “We”does not include descendants of enslaved Africans. The denial of free speech started with the slave codes and this denial continues under the U.S. Constitution.
Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Dr. Martin L. King ,Jr. were assassinated for exercising this constitutional illusion. Harry and Henriette Moore’s home was dynamited while they were asleep on Christmas Day. Mumia Abu Jamal and Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin are behind bars. Callie House was imprisoned.
According to a New York City tabloid, David Hazan,a city attorney, made news when he wrote a letter to the victims in Sean Bell et al.,dated June 27,2008,noting that it would be profitable if the parties waived discovery and trial and proceeded to settlement of all civil rights claims arising out of the massacre.
Soon after the Nov. 25, 2006, fatal shooting of Sean Bell and the critical wounding of Trent Benefield and Joseph Guzman, I predicted that there would be no genuine demand for a special prosecutor and, consequently, no conviction of any criminal charge.
With the acquiescence of Black leaders, the judicial system and law enforcement agents closed ranks behind the police assassins. The cover-up started with a grand jury proceeding orchestrated by a hostile prosecutor. It ended with a judge using the grand jury testimony of Benefield and Guzman to decide that the police assassins were not guilty.
I also predicted that there would be no discovery and no civil trial. Instead, the aggrieved parties would receive hush money. In high-profile cases of police terrorism, plaintiffs routinely settle their claims in return for hush money. A settlement completes the cover-up.
I learned of this modus operandi 25 years ago. Louis Clayton Jones, Michael Warren and I were representing the estate of Michael Stewart. The police had beaten him to death for kissing a white girl. We insisted on a public trial. We believed that Mayor Ed Koch and Chief Medical Examiner Eliot Gross were involved in a cover-up.
Before we knew what hit us, we had gotten the boot with no explanation from the representative of the estate. We had been a thorn in the side of the prosecutor’s office. The beating of Michael Stewart would have been a footnote absent aggressive lawyering on our part.
In the middle of the Stewart case, the Manhattan district attorney’s office put me on trial in 1984.This was prosecutorial vindictiveness. Jones left the country in 1986 while we were representing the Stewart estate, and he would never return to New York to practice law. Four years later, I would be disbarred from the practice of law for being an aggressive advocate for Blacks.
New York City will offer the attorneys for the estate of Sean Bell et al. an offer that they probably will not turn down. In the event that they insist on doing the right thing, they will be summarily disbarred from the practice of law. Since the 1850s,every outspoken Black lawyer in New York has been disbarred or exiled.
The lesson to be drawn from history is that the police department is a standing army and political power arises from the barrel of a gun. The “founding fathers” agreed. This is one of the true reasons for the Second Amendment. The proof in the pudding is the NYPD.
At one point, the criminal court in New York City was actually called the police court. The name was changed to conceal the designs of the judicial system. You will never hear a single Black leader condemn New York’s judicial system. It would be lights out.
Since the parties in Sean Bell et al. will probably opt for hush money instead of pursuing retributive justice, the movement will once again be reduced to “No Money! No Peace!” History would be repeating itself. See, for example, Michael Stewart, Alberta Spruill, Abner Louima and Amadou Diallo.
In the Abner Louima case, for example, the late Johnny Cochran promised that he would sue and pursue the New York Police Department as a criminal enterprise. When the hush money was put on the table, everyone shook hands and forgot the grievance. Nonetheless, it was too late to save Cochran’s life.
Blacks are treated worse in civil cases and the indignities heaped on them are worse than in criminal cases. For Blacks, prosecutors dictate the terms of any plea bargaining and city attorneys dictate the terms of any settlement involving police criminality. In contracts,it is called an unconscionable agreement. The culprit is the inability of Blacks to enjoy legal representation.
No one should be considered a traitor for taking hush money.This is customary law. When you seek to alter the status quo, you will be severely punished. Not every Black person is a Nat Turner or a David Walker. When you go after the police, you better be prepared to become a martyr and not look back.
The maintenance of white supremacy requires that leading Blacks and Black spokespersons receive hush money. The list includes ecclesiastical pimps, oathtakers, civil rights pretenders, self-appointed leaders and Black hosts on commercial radio. This group has wiped out the sacrifices of our revered ancestors. We are speeding back to square one.
I am the only person, in recent times, who has fingered law enforcement officials and, afterwards, survived defamation actions by police unions. I won the defamation case arising out of Howard Beach, and with my hands tied behind my back and scars on my back, I survived the defamation traps in the Tawana Brawley case. Nonetheless, I am still subject to judicial terrorism.
In New York, civil discovery is virtually unavailable in a high-profile police case. This lack of discovery protects prosecutors who have intentionally lied to the public. For example, the special prosecutor in the Brawley investigation, Robert Abrams, had told the public that Harry Crist ,Jr .,a police officer, had committed suicide and that I should be disciplined for insisting that Crist had been murdered.
The late Justice S. Barrett Hickman sealed Crist’s autopsy report, and for 10 years, it was hidden. This report should have been disclosed in 1987 and well in advance of the civil trial. Discovery rules in civil cases require advanced, liberal disclosure. An autopsy report is even discoverable in a criminal case which only allows for limited discovery.
The report was reluctantly disclosed several months into the “civil” trial, which started in November 1997. Crist had died in 1987.It showed that Crist had been murdered and Abrams had lied. Abrams’ conduct amounted to an obstruction of justice. There is no statute of limitations for murder.
This was only minute disclosure, however. Twenty years after Brawley fingered a “white cop, ”the Brawley file is still intact in the state’s vault. I had to defend myself in Dutchess County Supreme Court with virtually no discovery and with my hands tied behind my back while I was also beating back a Fifth Column.
Gov. David Paterson has buried his head in the sand while he knows—or should know—that the hidden Brawley file will prove not only my innocence but also that I was framed and railroaded. It will also prove that Tawana Brawley was the victim of state-sponsored defamation.
No appellate court could discount the legal import of this file. Paterson is obviously more interested in playing politics and protecting Mario Cuomo and Eliot Spitzer, former governors of New York, in addition to protecting Abrams. This is a miscarriage of justice. Suppression of exculpatory evidence is a violation of due process.
New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has an obvious or apparent conflict of interest. His father, Mario Cuomo, was involved in the Brawley case and he has an interest in keeping the Brawley file suppressed. Blood is thicker than water. Andrew Cuomo’s representation of the defendants in Maddox v. Prudenti et al has the appearance of improriety.
This country was born in secrecy at the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. The true meaning of the U.S. Constitution is still a secret. The FISA Court of today was the slave court of yesterday.In 2008, Blacks are still being tried on secret evidence in a public ordeal.This is the ongoing struggle in Brawley, and Blacks are still clueless.
To make its point, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has informed me that my appeal from a Star Chamber proceeding will occur on Aug.8, 2008.I will have only five minutes to make my point. This will constitute an exercise in futility. I had asked for a due process appeal. This would mean a reasonable opportunity to make an oral argument. Thus, Brawley will remain a secret.
July 6—Freedom Retreat for Boys and Girls, an overnight, sleep-away, leadership forum in the Catskill Mountains, will start for girls on July 20.
July 16—UAM’s weekly forum at 7:30 p.m.at Elks Plaza, 1068 Harriet Tubman Avenue (Fulton Street) near Classon Avenue, in Brooklyn. Take the C train to Franklin Avenue.
July 22—Councilman Charles Barron, John Beatty and Dr. Leonard Jeffries will head the “Friends of Alton Maddox,” a committee to honor Alton Maddox for his birthday (July 21) for the 35 years of unselfish and sacrificial service to Blacks in the tri-state area at the historic Cotton Club, 656 W. 125th St.(between Broadway and the West Side Highway) in Harlem on Tuesday starting at 7:30 p.m.
August 8—Oral argument in Maddox v. Prudenti et al. will be in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, 500 Pearl St. in Manhattan at 9:30 a.m.
For further information on all events, call United African Movement at (718) 834-9034.
See: www.reinstatealtonmaddox.net for “The Right to Keep and Bear Arms”; “Stand with Councilman Barron”; “Police Pressures Hynes for Convictions”; “Community Control of the NYPD”; “Parent Orientation”; “Police Steal Summer Jobs from Black Youth”; “Tim Russert and Michael Stewart”; and “U.S. Pardon for Marcus Garvey?”