By Roy S. Johnson, member of the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame, Edward R. Morrow Award winner, and a Pulitzer Prize finalist for commentary. His column appears on AL.com, The Lede, as well as SPEAKIN’ OUT NEWS
This is an opinion column.
Waaaaaah.
They were all about justice as long as the criminal justice system primarily impacted other folks—as long as justice was just us.
They were all-in on “rule of law” as long as most rulings tilted in their favor.
Now that one of their own—their big boo-thang—is a felon, justifiably convicted under rule of law by a jury of his peers, Alabama’s top Republicans are wailing louder than the bundled occupants of a neonatal nursery. Call it the big boo-hoo.
Waaaaaah.
No surprise, of course. In a New York courtroom Thursday, former president Donald Trump was found guilty on all 34 felony charges related to falsifying business records to obfuscate the use of campaign funds to illegally influence the 2016 election with hush money payments to adult film actor Stormy Daniels.
Guilty—times 34.
The ex-president/felon—he’s done more boohooing (and lying) than anyone—couldn’t arrive at his east side home just a few miles from the downtown courthouse before Alabama Republicans spit their pacifiers and began spewing practiced talking-point whines like sour formula: “witch hunt” (Sen. Tommy Tuberville), “banana republic” (Sen. Katie Britt), and “hoax” (Attorney General Steve Marshall).
Waaaaaah.
Blame the timing and the tenor. With the 2024 presidential election looming in November and felon Trump the presumptive Republican nominee, I’m not shocked at the party-line tears shed by the faithful. Even if it exposes their party’s blatant and pitiful hypocrisy about justice and the rule of law.
They’ve shed no tears since the passage of the 1977 Habitual Offender Act. Its egregiously harsh sentencing mandate—life without parole for a Class A felony after any three previous felony convictions (such as drug possession, a non-violent robbery, or, oh, falsifying business docs)—caused the state’s already crowded prison population to explode.
The state imprisoned 4,000 men and women when the HOA was passed. As of January, more than 20,000 people are tuna-canned into our penal mess, into a system built for 11,000. Into a system long declared inhumane and in violation of the U.S. Constitution by the U.S. Department of Justice.
Yet no tears.
No tears for the myriad men and women senselessly left behind bars because our Board of Pardons and Paroles board did little of either for years before its banal inhumanity was exposed by my colleagues earlier this year.
No tears for Quinton Cook and Frank Meadows, two brothers wrongfully convicted of rape when in their teens. Their convictions were overturned as “wrongful” last November by a Jefferson County circuit court judge after both men had lived more than 20 years behind our bars, serving their full sentences. Yet the state refused to compensate them a single penny for their pain—doing a flip-flop by deeming them ineligible for compensation just a couple of months after the Department of Risk Management had recommended in March that Meadows was eligible under the state’s wrongful conviction statute to receive $1,106,988.11 (based on 19 full years of incarceration, plus 364 days in 1996 and 125 days in 2015, when he was released) and Cook was eligible for $1,007,809.78 (19 years of incarceration, plus 227 days in 1995 and 195 days in 2014 when released).
No tears.
No tears for Toforest Johnson. He’s been on death row since 1998 after being convicted of murdering a sheriff’s deputy in Birmingham, a verdict a parade of public officials now says was terribly wrong. They’re all calling for Johnson to be granted a new trial—a motion has been filed in circuit court—yet Marshall won’t pick up the phone.
Indeed, he filed a brief arguing the U.S. Supreme Court should not hear Johnson’s case because it—the man’s life—”isn’t of extraordinary public importance.”
That’s a crying shame.
I can’t believe I’m typing this: Tuberville was right about one thing. “It’s a very dark day in American history,” he said at the start of his tirade.
“Sad and shameful” Britt similarly shared.
Dark, sad, and shameful indeed that for the first time in our nation’s history a former president is a felon.
It will be even darker, sadder, and more shameful should voters return the keys to our highest, most powerful office to him.
A felon in the White House. Those words should be enough to make us all cry.
