Source: http://eyalpress.com/articles/the-color-test
Timestamp: 2019-04-23 02:00:47+00:00

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EARLY LAST YEAR, ROUGHLY TWO HUNDRED PEOPLE CRAMMED into a third-floor conference room at the Open Society Institute in Manhattan to hear Professors David Cole and Randall Kennedy debate the issues of race, crime, and justice. The debate was timed to coincide with the publication of Cole’s book No Equal Justice (New Press), a searing indictment of the racial inequities in the legal system. What lent the occasion drama, however, was a less fortunate coincidence: Three weeks earlier, four New York City police officers fired forty-one bullets at an unarmed West African immigrant, Amadou Diallo, while he was standing in the vestibule of his Bronx apartment building.
The killing of Diallo, and the escalating clamor over police misconduct, have made the role of race in the administration of criminal justice one of America’s most volatile social issues. Cities across the country have watched crime drop dramatically in recent years – and seen prison rolls rise just as dramatically. At the same time, practices such as racial profiling and zero-tolerance policing have raised some unsettling questions: Has the reduction in crime come at too great a cost in liberty? And to what degree does race determine whose liberties are violated?
lavishly praised, books on the criminal justice system to appear in recent memory – only because the burdens fall almost exclusively on impoverished and minority communities.
Historically, Kennedy observed, African Americans have suffered as much or more from the underenforcement of the law – that is, the refusal of authorities to punish those who victimize blacks – as from its overenforcement. It’s a point Kennedy stresses in his own critically acclaimed book, Race, Crime, and the Law (Vintage, 1997), and one he believes should inform any assessment of recent efforts to clamp down on inner-city violence. Kennedy, who is African American, points out that many people in the black community have long complained about inadequate police protection. “Police brutality is of course a terrible thing,” he said in the debate with Cole, “but blacks at every income level are also more likely to be murdered, raped, burgled, assaulted.” And because the vast majority of crime is intraracial – that is, either white on white or black on black – policies that disproportionately burden black offenders disproportionately benefit black victims, leading to a paradox. “If you put the question of black victimization at the center,” Kennedy explained, “protecting minority communities from crime may mean putting more minority criminals in jail.” The room fell silent.
Cole and Kennedy are longtime sparring partners who have debated these issues both in print and in person and who seem to relish their confrontations. Ironically, however, the two law professors are in many ways kindred spirits. Both share a deep belief that racial disparities remain far too common. Both are public intellectuals who write as frequently in popular as in academic venues, and their views have shaped not only the scholarly debate but also the decisions of courts and legislatures.
Where they differ is in weighing liberty against security to determine which actors, and which rights, are in greatest need of protection. To Cole, the fact that over one million African Americans are today in prison (seven times the incarceration rate for whites), and that minorities are routinely stopped and arrested under dubious pretexts, shows that we have adopted a set of punitive policies that would never be accepted were they evenly administered. But as Kennedy sees it, our central concern should be the treatment not of minority suspects but of their victims. These differences have led Cole and Kennedy to quarrel over everything from the impact of the drug war to the legal standards courts should use to redress discrimination – and have produced a dialogue of unusual depth between two highly provocative scholars.
COLE AND KENNEDY have known each other since the early 1980s, when they were classmates at Yale Law School, where Cole says he spent three years thinking he would become anything but a law professor.
After landing a paid job at CCR, Cole got to know the legendary William Kunstler, the wild-haired radical attorney with whom he worked on the famous 1990 Supreme Court flag-burning case, United States v. Eichman. Though Kunstler insisted on arguing the case, it was Cole, who had not yet turned thirty, who wrote the briefs that convinced the Court to overturn the 1989 Flag Protection Act. His work on this case landed him a laudatory profile in the New York Times At the Bar column and prompted an opposing lawyer from the solicitor general’s office to comment that Cole’s brief was the best he’d ever read.
With his curly brown hair, boyish face, and casual attire, Cole still does not look the part of the typical law professor. He is tall and slender, with the long arms and lanky frame of a swimmer (a sport he lettered in as an undergraduate), and he has a distinctly humble manner. You would never know, from meeting him, that Cole is not only a prolific scholar, having published two books and dozens of prominent law review articles, but also one of the nation’s preeminent civil rights attorneys. During the past decade, he has litigated a dizzying array of high-profile cases, from Finley v. National Endowment for the Arts, where he defended the four artists accused of violating the NEA’s “decency” standard, to Massachusetts v. Secretary of Health and Human Services, where he helped strike down a regulation prohibiting federally funded clinics from counseling women about abortion, to American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee v. Reno, one of numerous cases where Cole has defended Arab immigrants against controversial antiterrorism laws that curtail civil liberties. Somehow, Cole also manages to write a column for Legal Times, serve as the legal affairs correspondent for The Nation, and speak regularly on National Public Radio. After lunch, as we approached his fourth-floor office, a narrow alcove submerged in a sea of documents from the various cases he was litigating, I asked Cole how he managed to keep everything together. “I don’t spend much time filing,” he quipped.
It was, however, hardly surprising. No Equal Justice appeared in February 1999, the month of the Diallo shooting and two months before the start of the Abner Louima trial, a case involving a Haitian man who was brutally beaten and sodomized with a toilet plunger by two New York City police officers. Around the same time, the New Jersey attorney general’s office released a report acknowledging that state troopers engaged in racial profiling, a problem that has surfaced in Maryland, Florida, and numerous other states. A few months later, Columbia University’s Center for Violence Research & Prevention, in conjunction with the New York attorney general, published a study showing that over a fifteen-month period in New York City, blacks were 2.1 times more likely (and Hispanics 1.7 times more likely) to be stopped and frisked than whites – even when controlling for higher crime rates in minority neighborhoods.
What there has not been, Cole believes, is an understanding of how racial inequality is structurally ingrained in the legal system. “The root of the problem,” wrote Brent Staples in a March 12 New York Times op-ed, “is the tendency of white police officers – and white Americans generally – to associate blackness with criminality in the absence of any substantiating evidence.” It’s a common assessment, yet a misguided one, Cole believes. The real root of the problem, he argues, is less the prejudice of police officers than a series of little-noted Supreme Court rulings that have eviscerated the Fourth Amendment (which protects citizens from unreasonable search and seizure) and empowered the police to arrest people without any objective, individualized basis for suspicion.
In Whren v. United States (1996), for example, Cole notes that the Supreme Court granted officers the right to use any traffic violation as a pretext for stopping a driver even if they have no intention of enforcing a traffic law. In a 1991 decision, the Court ruled that the police may search passengers’ bags in so-called bus sweeps without establishing any individualized basis for suspicion. In an earlier ruling, Terry v. Ohio (1968), the Court determined that officers may stop people on the basis of “reasonable suspicion,” a doctrine significantly vaguer than the “probable cause” standard previously demanded.
None of these decisions allows the police to arrest someone on the basis of his or her race, Cole notes. What they do is grant law enforcement so much discretion that cops can stop virtually anyone for any reason, thus inviting racial profiling. Reviewing federal court cases involving drug stops at airports, Cole found that courts accepted the following justifications: Suspect walked quickly through airport; suspect walked slowly through airport; suspect carried no luggage; suspect carried brand-new luggage; suspect traveled alone; suspect traveled with a companion. In over 90 percent of these cases, the suspect also happened to be black or Hispanic.
To Cole, that such patterns do not appear racially motivated makes them all the more insidious. Societies, he notes in No Equal Justice, aim to balance two competing interests in devising crime policy – liberty and security. Liberals and conservatives might disagree on where to draw the line, “but both sides agree, at least in principle, that the line should be drawn in the same place for everyone.” America, however, has mediated the tension between liberty and security “not by picking one point on the continuum, but in effect by picking two points – one for the more privileged and educated, the other for the poor and less educated,” writes Cole.
IN FACT, as Cole is well aware, Randall Kennedy is a staunch critic of racial profiling. In Race, Crime, and the Law, Kennedy argues that although it may be “reasonable” for police officers to be more suspicious of minorities (due to higher rates of some forms of criminal conduct), such suspicion is incompatible with the ideal of creating a color-blind society. Kennedy’s criticism of racial profiling focuses on those cases where courts have sanctioned the explicit use of race as one of many factors justifying heightened suspicion. In United States v. Martinez-Fuerte, for example, the Supreme Court held that the Border Patrol can lawfully consider Mexican ancestry in deciding which vehicles to search for illegal aliens. To Cole, such rulings are hardly the central problem. To Kennedy, however, concentrating on purposeful discrimination is important. He reasons that in the absence of discriminatory intent, assessing whether a law is actually harmful to minorities is far more complicated than liberal critics commonly assume.
Some critics attack as racist urban curfews that regulate youngsters on the grounds that such curfews will disproportionately fall upon minority youngsters. But are black communities hurt by curfews which limit the late-night activities of minors or helped insofar as some of their residents feel more secure because of the curfews? Some critics attack as racist police crackdowns on violent gangs because such actions will disproportionately affect black members of gangs. But are black communities hurt by police crackdowns on violent gangs or helped by the destabilization of gangs that terrorize those who live in their midst?
It’s not that Kennedy doesn’t think minority suspects, too, have suffered from discrimination at the hands of white authorities. He recalls that while growing up in Washington, D.C., he would travel with his family to visit relatives in South Carolina, and his father would get pulled over for no apparent reason. “He was a black man with out-of-state plates in a nice car,” explained Kennedy. “That was enough.” Kennedy later interned at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, an experience that politicized him in much the way that Cole’s internship politicized him, and went on to clerk for the Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall.
His critique provoked an uproar, including articles in the New York Times and The Nation. Angry ripostes followed from Matsuda, Bell, and Delgado, who accused Kennedy of publishing the piece “for the purposes of justifying the current politico-legal system” and of turning a blind eye to the “flagrant exclusion” of minority scholars from positions of power. A year later, Kennedy launched the short-lived Reconstruction, a journal on African-American politics and culture that quickly established a reputation for bucking conventional wisdom, featuring articles by authors such as Stephen Carter, Glenn Loury, and…David Cole.
THE PREMISE underlies one of Kennedy’s most controversial arguments: namely, that the different punishments for trafficking crack versus powder cocaine (a person convicted of selling five grams of crack receives the same punishment as a person convicted of distributing five hundred grams of powder cocaine) are not, as critics commonly allege, the product of racism. In No Equal Justice, Cole points to statistics indicating that 93 percent of those convicted of crimes involving crack were black and 45 percent of those convicted of crimes involving powder cocaine were white, a seemingly clear sign that maintaining the 100:1 disparity exacerbates racial inequality.
“One of the reasons I wrote about that,” Kennedy told me, “is that I was reading through all these articles on the crack/cocaine distinction, and nobody – nobody – was talking about the history of congressional attitudes about crack. So I decided to look it up.” He leaned forward. “Well, it so happens that the first person to draw attention to the dangers of crack was Charles Rangel,” an African-American liberal Democrat who represents Harlem in the House, “and there were a substantial number of other black representatives who started saying, ‘Hey, let’s crack down on crack,’ because they felt it wasn’t being taken seriously.” In other words, it was not racism but a concern about crack’s devastating impact on inner-city neighborhoods that drove the legislation. Such concerns, Kennedy notes, are hardly rare in the black community: A 1993 Gallup poll, for example, found that 82 percent of blacks believed the courts in their areas do not treat criminals harshly enough, 75 percent favored putting more police on the streets, and 68 percent advocated building more prisons so that longer sentences could be given to criminals.
Soon after it appeared, Kennedy’s article was cited in a Washington, D.C., court of appeals ruling that rejected a constitutional challenge to the crack/cocaine distinction.
In addition, Cole charged, by arguing that only laws that are explicitly racist should be subject to review under the equal protection clause (the so-called intent doctrine espoused by the current Supreme Court), Kennedy would exempt from scrutiny the vast majority of modern discrimination, which is subtle, unconscious, and structural. Cole noted that Kennedy himself argued this point in a 1991 article on the controversial McClesky v. Kemp decision. Warren McClesky, a black man facing the death penalty for killing a white police officer, had challenged the death penalty’s constitutionality by presenting evidence that defendants charged with killing whites were 4.3 times more likely to receive a death sentence than defendants charged with killing blacks. In a five-four decision, the Supreme Court ruled that while the statistics seemed to show disparate treatment, McClesky would have to show purposeful racial discrimination in his own case to raise constitutional concerns.
Kennedy has been an unsparing critic of the McClesky ruling, describing the Court as “haunted by anxiety over the consequences of acknowledging candidly the large influence of racial sentiment” underscored by the statistics. But if this is the case with the death penalty, why not with the drug war, where, Cole argues, racial selectivity is equally stark?
Ultimately, Cole’s book will not likely appeal to those who view punishment and incarceration as the best mechanisms for enhancing security. Interestingly, though, Cole admits that some people might answer his call for equality by arguing that criminal justice should be more punitive across the board. In Minnesota, he notes, when the Supreme Court invalidated the crack/cocaine distinction, the legislature responded not by liberalizing the crack law but by increasing the penalty for powder – an approach Cole deems overly punitive but still preferable to the existing double standard.
IT’S WITHIN this context that Cole finds fault with Kennedy’s emphasis on security. “I don’t think Randy has this intent, but his work unfortunately lends legitimacy to people who are advocating harsher and harsher policies that ultimately redound to the detriment of the black community,” he says. In a recent article in the Georgetown Law Journal, Cole links this aspect of Kennedy’s work to what he calls “the new discretion scholarship.” During the past two decades, Cole notes, a growing number of scholars, building on the “broken windows” theory, have embraced the notion that in order to control crime in inner-city neighborhoods, courts need to broaden the police’s discretion even further.

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