Why I’m Voting for Biden
By: Chris Hendrixson
Tags: Biden, Election 2020, Courage, Politics, Criminal Justice Reform

Since I’ve been of voting age I voted for George W. Bush twice, John McCain — if you go back and watch a certain McCain campaign rally in Columbus, OH, you’ll see me standing behind the man himself — and Mitt Romney. Growing up, everyone I knew was a Republican. So, I was too.

In 2016, I didn’t vote. I was out of town at the time and the whole thing, logistically, felt like a hassle to figure out. I was pulling for Hillary and I was certain she’d win, anyway. Even after Trump won, I still didn’t care a whole lot about it. I wasn’t really “into politics” at the time, which I’ve come to realize is a privilege only afforded to folks like me, a White man born into relative wealth in America. I won’t get into all that right now but the extremely short version is this: I’ve realized that the privileged group in a society has the ability to decide whether or not to engage with politics, since policy change often has little effect on their wellbeing.

To say that the last four years alone pushed me across the chasm from right to left is an incomplete summary of my journey. However, the last four years solidified a growing disillusionment with Republican policies. It’s an arduous journey to shift one’s political perspective. And in some significant ways it was influenced in 2014 by a podcast that was sweeping across the nation: Serial.

Serial, Season One, explored the 1999 murder of Hae Min Lee and the conviction and life sentence of her ex-boyfriend, Adnan Syed. At the heart of the podcast is the question of Syed’s guilt or innocence. Through Serial and spin-off podcasts — Undisclosed is a great place to start if you’ve already listened to Serial — I now believe that Adnan is innocent of this crime. He remains in prison today. He’s one year older than me.

Serial exposed me to a real-life story of a wrongful conviction and its devastating effects on the family and friends of the wrongfully accused. I found it so hard to believe that there were actually innocent people in prison. I thought it only happened in movies.

What I found most troubling, though, about Adnan’s story was how hard the state of Maryland was willing to fight to keep him in prison, even in light of new evidence and witness testimony that’s since been completely dismantled by legal experts. I’d come to learn this is an all-too common refrain among the wrongfully accused.

Dean Strang, attorney for Brendan Dassey and Steven Avery of the documentary Making a Murderer, aptly calls this a “tragic lack of humility”:

“Most of what ails our criminal justice system lie in unwarranted certitude on the part of police officers and prosecutors and defense lawyers and judges and jurors, that they’re getting it right. Just a tragic lack of humility.”

The deeper I got into adjacent stories of injustices in the system — Undisclosed’s deep dive into Baltimore’s handling of Freddie Gray’s arrest and death in police custody, for one — the more troubled I became, not only at the misconduct itself but the way in which leadership handled the situations afterward.

Instead of showing humility, I saw a bleak trend in which leaders failed to take responsibility, and in the worst cases lied to the public in order to save their own reputations. This should be troubling to all of us.

Folks in the justice system will often say that everyone lies in court — civilians and elected officials, alike — but what is hard to accept is the way in which we, as judges and juries, show extreme justice, and often blatant cruelty, towards “criminals” while almost universally giving police and elected officials the benefit of the doubt. When the police don’t hold themselves accountable, who will?

I started to look around at who else cares about these issues.

I followed DeRay Mckesson on Twitter. I watched the documentary 13th. I read Cory Booker’s book United: Thoughts on Finding Common Ground and Advancing the Common Good.

I read articles about Philadephia’s District Attorney Larry Krasner and other “progressive prosecutors” like him who are working hard to make changes in a system that is not always kind to those fighting for reform.

I found compassion and humility in these folks, though President Trump doesn’t quite see things that way. At a campaign rally in Hershey, PA in 2019, he had this to say about Krasner:

“You have the worst district attorney. I’ve been hearing about this guy.”

Other Republican leaders are following suit, too. Attorney General Bill Barr, in a speech to the Fraternal Order of Police in New Orleans, lamented the rise of progressive prosecutors:

“There is another development that is demoralizing to law enforcement and dangerous to public safety. That is the emergence in some of our large cities of District Attorneys that style themselves as “social justice” reformers, who spend their time undercutting the police, letting criminals off the hook, and refusing to enforce the law.”

For now, it’s clear that the leaders of the Republican Party are not interested in seeing much change in the criminal justice system and that’s a shame. We can both support the police and call for more accountability. I believe many of our police officers want that, too.

True change will happen when we meet in the middle, reach across protest lines and shake hands (or bump elbows) and listen to one another. This is what true leadership looks like and what our country desperately needs right now.

Joe Biden’s own history with criminal justice reform is not perfect. He supported the 1994 crime bill that many believe was instrumental to the mass incarceration epidemic we face today. Biden, however, has admitted that parts of the bill were a mistake, an admirable show of humility rarely seen from President Trump. What’s more, Biden’s hand in the legislature was the result of compromises with Republican colleagues and that gives me hope that he’ll be willing to work across the aisle again in the future.

During the first presidential debate of 2020, Biden was asked about criminal justice reform and this is what he said:

“What I’m going to do as President of the United States is call together an entire group of people at the White House, everything from the civil rights groups, to the police officers, to the police chiefs, and we’re going to work this out.”

We must come together to make change. Yelling insults from the trenches is only going to make matters worse in the streets. Meeting in the middle requires tremendous courage.

I am hopeful for our country. We are courageous, indeed.