Verse for George Floyd as Cop Trial Goes On—National Poetry Month 2021

Protests continue daily in Minneapolis during the trial of Derek Chauvlin for the murder of George Floyd.  Despite massive security and media-stoked fears of a rampage demonstrations have been angry, determined, but peaceful.  There is even guarded hope that at long last a racist cop will be held accountable.

The second week of the trial of George Floyd’s murder resumes today in Minneapolis.  Things are not going well for former cop Derek Chauvin who decided to take a knee on Blackness.  The trial has been aired live on cable and excerpts have dominated news casts and social media posts.  Video from every possible angle has been played and replayed.  As the warnings attest the scene is relentlessly disturbing.  Witnesses have wept again and again on the stand.  Paramedics described their own distress at trying to get Chauvin to remove his knees so that they could at least try to resuscitate the already dead man.  Police superiors have testified that  Chauvin recklessly violated department policy on restraint.  Today the Chief of Police is slated to testify to the same thing.

Meanwhile the Defense is trying to portray Floyd as a dangerous drug abuser whose death was not due to suffocation but to an overdose and underlying cardiac issues.  To hear them tell it Chauvin’s knee was in the vicinity purely by chance.  They like to replay footage of the big, heavily muscled Black man initially struggling against be placed in a car.  They hope that at least one juror will be frightened and cause a hung jury.  It’s their only hope.  They have no chance of winning an acquittal.

At this point huge numbers of Americans are also virtual jurors.  Let me put this plainly—at this point anyone who believes that Chauvin is somehow innocent is a prima facie racist.  Peddle outraged denials elsewhere.

Poets, of course, have been commenting on George Floyd’s murder and the broken system it exposed from the beginning here are just three examples I picked from hundreds.

Tori Derricotte.

Toi Derricotte was born in Hamtramck, Michigan on April 12, 1941.  Her family life was marked by death, abuse, pain, and racism.  Her Roman Catholic schooling and light skin, often made he feel alienated and guilty. She received her B.A. from Wayne State University and an M.A. in English Literature from New York University.  She is a professor of writing at the University of Pittsburgh and won a 2012 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. With Cornelius Eady, she co-founded Cave Canem Foundation, a summer workshop for African-American poets.  Derricotte’s books of poetry include The Empress of the Death House (1978), a collection that draws on her early experiences at her grandparents’ funeral home in Detroit; Natural Birth (1983), Captivity (1989), Tender (1997), winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize, and The Undertaker’s Daughter (2011).

Why I Don’t Write About George Floyd

Because there is too much to say
Because I have nothing to say
Because I don’t know what to say
Because everything has been said
Because it hurts too much to say
What can I say what can I say
Something is stuck in my throat
Something is stuck like an apple
Something is stuck like a knife
Something is stuffed like a foot
Something is stuffed like a body

 

—Toi Derricotte

Olive Senior.

Olive Senior has been sharing poems on Twitter throughout the Coronavirus pandemic in a series called Pandemic Poetry. You can check those out at @olivesenior. B for Breathe was first published as part of Pandemic Poems.

Senior is a Jamaican-Canadian writer and the author of 18 books of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and children's literature. She is a winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and her collection Over the Roofs of the World was shortlisted for the 2005 Governor General's Literary Award for poetry. In 2019, Senior delivered the prestigious Margaret Laurence Lecture. Her latest book is the children’s picture book Boonoonoonous Hair, which was illustrated by Laura James.

B for Breathe

It takes one’s breath away: a man dying during a pandemic that

takes away one’s breath, no ventilator but one brave spectator,

recording 

 

his last breath, his need please

 

somebody

 

taking the knee on the neck from men who from birth breathed in

tainted air, imbibed a foul history, burning crosses

 

still smouldering

 

i can’t breathe

 

like the hot breath of anger consuming the cities

that inhaled this before

this white heat this

burning sensation in the throats of

the numerous ones held down and 

 

mama

mama

i can’t

 

Come on, George Floyd, breathe in the timeless rhythm of Mother

Earth waiting for you, for all her lost children, for justice

 

I’m through

I’m through

 

—Olive Senior

Jonathon Peterson a/k/a  JP da Poet

Jonathon Peterson is an Alabama spoken word artist and poetry slam performer who was profiled in the Montgomery Advertiser for this poem when the murder of George Floyd seemed like the straw that broke the camel’s back.  He writes and performs under the name JP da Poet.  As the father of a son the accumulated pain of injustice after injustice is more acute.

If Black Lives Mattered

Before I wrote this poem, I sat with my pen in my hand for eight minutes and 46 seconds,

Then second guessed myself like maybe I got the time wrong cause this just seems too long for a man to have a knee on his neck,

I checked time again on impulse, pulse racing, chasing a logical explanation for the asphyxiation of another Black man at the hands of the men in blue who swore to protect and serve.

I heard him sayin’ he can’t breathe.

To me, logically that meant air wasn't properly reaching his lungs, he hung on as long as he could,

But when the weight of the world's wicked ways weighs on your throat you would choke, too.

The situation is so sad, rest in peace George Floyd.

And it seems it happens too often.

They offed 10 in the last two months.

An aunt, Atatiana Jefferson, we learned her name after shot in her home playin’ video games in front of her nephew who had to watch his loved one killed by someone he thought were the good guys.

I try to imagine how an EMT asleep in her home shot after shocked a no-knock warrant warranted police to force entry in her home in the middle of the night,

I fight to find the logic in justification of the situation. Breonna Taylor, gone to soon.

It’s messed up we live in a society where in so many cases like Kalief Browder were treated guilty until proven innocent.

With no evidence even evident somehow we’re still prime suspect.

The system is backwards and broken,

And I’m not joking or jivin’ when I say simply for ridin’ with an improper signal can give off a signal for a cop,

To hold you for an hourlong traffic stop.

Enough is enough when I saw my sister body-slammed in handcuffs,

And yes, I can attest with Sandra Bland's family,

That that was such an unnecessary tragedy.

But you see,

But you see, when in broad daylight for a broken taillight a brother named Walter Scott can be shot in the back on video with evidence planted. 

Should finally show what we perceived as straight is actually slanted,

And as crooked as some of these politicians.

And through repetition time and time again,

We’re losing our Black men to the pen not for the offense,

But at the hands of a great conviction rate.

Prosecutor turns persecutor,

If you don't have enough money for bond then you are merely a pawn in this game when we are the weakest pieces.

 

You see Black lives mattering started tiptoeing on that fine line around the time they introduced court fines and minimum sentencing guidelines.

And how is it that the time we get is always what we deserve?

But the same predicament, different pigment, gets them off with time served is just not fair.

But you see fairness,

Fairness took its last breath asking for reprieve using the words “I can't breathe,” by George Floyd or Eric Garner,

Another brother whose only crime was selling short Newports, no weapon.

Mike Brown gunned down.

Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice,

Whatever they did, they were still some kids who deserve to live,

If Black lives mattered,

Then why are our hearts being shattered as our ashes are being scattered into the winds of injustice.

I want you to take a second and close your eye,

For real do it close your eyes.

Now imagine you've been confined to a 8-by-5 for the last 30 years of your life.

Now take a deep breath.

What if I told you your sentence was death for a crime you did not do.

 

Look up the story, it's really true.

Right here in Alabama, Anthony Ray Hinton could have been anyone of you.

And that’s as real as the man’s missed appeals for not copping to a plea deal,

If Black lives mattered.

If Black lives mattered then Laquan McDonald wouldn’t have received one less bullet in his body than he got the number of candles on his last birthday cake.

And as we lay in the wake of the Flint water tragedy,

These modern-day catastrophes from Freddie Gray back to the Jena 6,

It literally makes me sick to even know I have to pen this.

But let me ask you a question, 

If Black lives matter then please tell me why our hearts are still being shattered as our ashes are still being scattered into the winds of injustice?

 

—JP da Poet

Becoming an All-Expense Paid Guest of Uncle Sam —The Trial

This is the imposing Federal Court room in which I was tried several years before this picture was taken.  At the time shorter defense and prosecution tales were set parallel to the bench instead of this conigfuration.

Note:  Fourth in a series of memoir posts about my adventures with the Selective Service and Justice systems in the Vietnam War era.

The Dirksen Federal Building was just a few years old back in 1973.  It had replaced a large and imposing pile of stone in the Beaux Art style of the Columbian Exposition that had been reduced to rubble.  In a city that prided itself on architecture, the glass curtain sky scraper by superstar Mies van der Rohe was a source of civic pride.

As I approached it from a Subway staircase on Clark Street it loomed in the gray morning like a giant black shoebox stood on end.  It rose from a bleak and then as yet unadorned plaza balancing on its central bank of elevators.  A skirt of floor to ceiling clear glass encased the first floor exposing an expanse of marble floor and a stone wall with aluminum letters reading The Everett McKinley Dirksen United States Court Building.

In those days there was no visible security.  Doors on all side were open and hoards poured through on the way to their destinations.  A lone figure stood at a desk under the stone wall.  His function was mainly to direct visitors to the correct elevator.

After receiving the correct instruction, I squeezed into a packed elevator was zoomed to a courtroom floor.  I was supposed to meet my lawyer, the esteemed Jason Bellow, outside the courtroom a few minutes early for a last consultation.  I was early.  He was not.

I fidgeted in a charcoal gray pin striped three piece suite that I had acquired in high school and not worn since, a pair of highly polished western style side zippered boots that I had borrowed from my father and which did not fit well, and a recently acquired pearl gray Stetson, my new dress hat.  I wanted to look respectable.

Moments before the court call a bailiff stepped out and announced that anyone with business should come in.  My lawyer was still not there.

The court room was dimly lit, much darker than I had expected.  It had a large seating area totally vacant that day.  In front of a rail were two tables.  On the left sat two, count them two prosecutors, although only one of them would actually speak.  Several piles of documents and legal pads littered the table and on one corner a thick file marked FBI laid conspicuously.  A dark wood judge’s bench loomed impressively in front of a Justice Department seal on the wall.  A witness box was on the right.  Off to one side in the space between the bench and the counsels’ tables and a woman in a tight, short skirt sat as demurely as possible behind a stenography machine.  Just like in the movies, only darker.

Moments before the bailiff was set to call the Court to order, Jason Bellow ambled in casually, a friendly smile on his face.  Natty as when I had first seen him, he carried a slender black attaché case.  After shaking my hand, he clicked it open and retrieved a single slender manila file.  So slender, in fact, that it contained nothing but a copy of the indictment.  He laid it on the table and leaned over to whisper in my ear, “Are you sure you don’t want to plead?”

Shocked, I could only shake my head before the court was called to order.

Judge Sam Perry was a small, elderly man dwarfed by his bench.  He had served on the Circuit Court since being appointed by Harry Truman in 1951 and was officially retired to senior status, hearing a few overload cases each month.  He was most famous for presiding over the epic trial for civil damages against the law enforcement officials who had murdered Black Panther Fred Hampton in his sleep.  After the longest trial in the history of the circuit, Perry had dismissed all charges.  He was overturned on appeal.

Despite this, he was no Julius Hoffmann and had a reputation for lenience in draft cases.

When asked by the judge, Bellow and I rose together and when asked, “How does the defendant plead? I replied as firmly as possible, “Not guilty, your honor.”

About that time my girl friend Cecelia arrived and settled into a seat in the visitors’ gallery directly behind the defense table.  This was a surprise to me.  At breakfast she said that she was busy and couldn’t make it.  I guess she changed her plans.

After a few formalities one of the prosecutors rose to make his opening statement.  “On the [blank] day of December, 1972 the defendant, Patrick Mills Murfin did willfully refuse to submit to a lawful order of induction into the service of the United States of America…”  Blah, blah, blah.  He laid out the facts of that day which were, as he pointed out to the judge “irrefutable.” 

He could have sat down then.  But he strolled from around the table and neared the bench, “Your honor,” he said pointing to the thick FBI file on the table, “The facts will show that the defendant was not motivated by religious conviction or pacifism, but by an abiding hatred of the government of the United States as shown by his willing and boastful membership in a known subversive organization.”

This was the point when I expected my lawyer to leap to his feet and object.  He did not.  And when it was his turn to give our opening, he said, “The Defense has nothing to say at this time.”  I must have looked alarmed. 

“Don’t worry, an opening would only prolong the trial and irk the judge.” He whispered to me.

The Prosecutor called his first witness, the Clerk of my local Draft Board in Skokie.  He asked for a detailed history of my registration and history.  Of course, that included the episode of the returned draft card and the letter from me requesting a new one.  He covered my student deferment and asked if I still had any deferment.  The answer was no.  “So, Mr. Murfin was lawfully subject to the draft when he received his induction notice?”   Yes, came the reply.

O.K. I figured that this is where we would make our case.  The draft and resistance councilors at the American Friends Service Committee had discovered that I was removed from the eligibility pool for over a year while the FBI assembled that thick file on the prosecution table, and had then returned me to the pool with my window of eligibility clock set back to the date I was removed.  And they never informed me that my eligibility was “suspended.”  Based on that, the Quakers believed, I could argue that I refused induction in good faith on the grounds that I believed my eligibility had lapsed.

I had informed Bellow about this in our one brief consultation and provided him documents from the Service Committee and even given him their phone number for further consultation.  I expected him to rise and ask the Clerk the critical questions.  Instead he rose and simply said, “The Defense has no questions, Your Honor.”  The witness was dismissed.

The prosecution brought two more witnesses, one of the NCOs who witnessed my actual refusal to step forward to accept induction, and one of the FBI agents who arrested me that day.  Bellows had no questions for them.  Neither was on the stand for five minutes.

With that the Prosecution rested.  I figured maybe Bellow planned to call me and get the eligibility issue out that way.  “The Defense has no witnesses, Your Honor.”

I was now in a state of shock.

The Defense got to make the first closing argument.  Bellow finally stood up and had something to say.  “I met this young man and found him charming and articulate.”  Charming and articulate? “He comes from a good home and his father was a decorated hero of the Second World War.  He is idealistic.  Young men are idealistic.”  He smiled warmly at the judge as if the two of them were together on some secret.  And then he sat down.  Our entire defense was that I was a nice, naïve young man.

The Prosecutor got in his last lick.  A scornful portrait of a dangerous subversive.  That was it the trial was over in about a half an hour.

The judge announced that he would retire to his chambers to consider his verdict, but instructed us to stay close.  As near as I could tell, “considering the verdict” consisted of taking a leak.  We were hardly out of the courtroom and I was still trying to roll a Prince Albert cigarette with shaky hands when the Bailiff called us back.

I stood in front of the judge with my attorney on one side and Cecelia, who for some reason was allowed to join us, on the other.  “I find the Defendant, Patrick Mills Murfin guilty as charged…”  I squeezed Cecelia’s hand.

“At this point,” Judge Perry said, “We usually release the prisoner on bail pending a pre-sentencing investigation into his character and chances of rehabilitation.  That will not be necessary in this case.  We know what kind of young man this is.”  He waved at that damn FBI file.  “I have read the documents you filled out at your induction and was shocked by your disrespect.  This is no laughing matter, as you are about to find out.  I sentence the Defendant to 36 months of confinement in a Federal Correctional Facility.”

I think my knees may have actually buckled.  The Judge did allow me to be released on my own recognizance for two weeks to, “get your affairs in order.”  He stood up and left the bench.  It was over.

Did I mention it was St. Patrick’s Day?  My 24th birthday.

Next:  The Interim.

John Peter Zenger and the Right to Be An Obnoxious Pain in the Ass

Philadelphia lawyer Andrew Hamilton making his dramatic appeal to the jurors in the John Peter  Zender Libel Trial.

August 4 is often considered the birthday of Freedom of the Press in America.  On this day in 1736 the original Philadelphia lawyer, Andrew Hamilton successfully persuaded a New York jury to acquit John Peter Zenger of a charge of seditious libel for printing criticisms of Royal Governor William Cosby.  It was no easy feat. 

Cosby had stacked the deck against the German-born printer by hand picking loyal toadies to sit in the special two judge court that conducted the trial and then had both of Zenger’s original lawyers disbarred for objecting to the irregularity. 

Zenger was a master printer who was hired by the owners of the New York Weekly Journal to produce the paper.  He was listed as printer and editor, but the editorial content of the publication was controlled by political opponents of the Governor including James Alexander, a leading lawyer, former attorney general for both New York and New Jersey and a member of the powerful Governor’s Council for both colonies.  Alexander anonymously wrote and had scathing denunciations of Governor Crosby printed each Monday. 

The unpopular Governor was infuriated.  He was turned down by the Provincial Assembly when he asked for permission to conduct a public burning of copies of the Weekly Journal.  Instead, he ordered Zenger arrested and jailed, although it is unclear whether the printer even shared the views of his employers.  In short, Zenger was a fall guy for Alexander and his fellow Whig opponents of the governor. 

But Zenger was up for the game.  He dictated an account of his arrest through a hole in the door of his jail cell to his wife and his apprentices set up and distributed an edition of the Weekly Journal.  Alexander and another prominent lawyer, William Smith agreed to represent Zenger.  When they objected to Cosby’s stacked court, they were disbarred.  Naturally, no other local members of the bar were eager to take their place. 

The case came to the attention of another printer, Benjamin Franklin of Philadelphia.  Franklin had a natural interest in freedom of the press and as Post Master General of the Colonies he was in an unusually good position to be kept on top of developments far and wide.  He was also the acknowledged leader of the Philadelphia business and professional community.  Franklin recruited Hamilton, the leading member of the Pennsylvania Bar to accept Zenger’s case on a pro bono basis. 

Hamilton, like Alexander, was Scottish emigrant with a Jacobean past.  In court, he took a daring approach.  The presiding judges had already warned jurors to disregard Hamilton’s “slanders” and render a verdict of  guilty based on his charge of printing false, scandalous, and malicious articles about the Governor. 

Hamilton readily admitted to the facts.  Zenger had indeed printed and distributed the articles as charged and under the law, he acknowledged, that was sufficient for conviction of libel.  In defense, he argued that the articles if libelous they were none the less true.  His offer to produce evidence of their truth was squelched by the Judge. 

But in a magnificent summation he called upon the jurors to recognize the truth of the charges on the basis of their own experience of affairs in the colony.  “The question before the court and you, gentlemen of the jury, is not of small nor private concern,” Hamilton pleaded. “...No! It may in its consequences affect every free man that lives under a British government on the main of America. It is the best cause of liberty...” 

Then he shocked the jury—he called upon them to vote for acquittal because the prosecution was a manifest injustice whatever the letter of the law read.  And the jury bought it.  They brought in a unanimous verdict for acquittal.  It was the first instance of jury nullification in North American history.   

The verdict was popular in New York and across the Colonies and Hamilton became widely celebrated.  The Common Council of New York City awarded him the freedom of city, and a group of prominent residents contributed to the production of a 5½-ounce gold box that was presented to him as a lasting mark of their gratitude.  The box remained a family heirloom but replicas are still given out by the Philadelphia Bar Association to their out-going Chancellor, a position once held by Hamilton. 

Zenger published a verbatim account of the trial as A Brief Narrative of the Case and Trial of John Peter Zenger and then quietly returned to his trade and continued printing the Weekly Journal.  He died in 1746 at the age of 49. 

Governor Cosby did not last so long.  He died of tuberculosis in Albany in March, 1736. 

George Clarke was elevated to acting Royal Governor until a permanent replacement, George Clinton, took office in 1743.  Clarke restored Alexander and Smith to the Bar and reappointed Alexander to his Council. 

Alexander resumed is career becoming leading Whig in provincial politics of both New York and New Jersey.  In 1743 he became a co-founder with Franklin of the American Philosophical Society and in 1751 helped establish King’s College (now Columbia University.)  He died full of honors in 1756. 

Writing after the American Revolution, Gouverneur Morris observed that the “trial of Zenger in 1735 was the germ of American freedom, the morning star of that liberty which subsequently revolutionized America.”