Saddened by the death of Oscar Grant
I am deeply saddened by the death of Oscar Grant. Most of you have heard the story in one form or another. Basically, police officers were called to a fight on the BART train. Somehow, Oscar Grant, an unarmed man, ended up getting shot. This all happened early in the morning of January 1, 2009. The police officer, Johannes Mehserle, was just sentenced to two years with credit for time served. The story that the officer told, which I do not believe, was that the officer was reaching for his TASER and instead pulled out his gun and fired. Involuntary manslaughter. Two years in jail. One man dead.
As I read more and more about this case I’m left with a couple of questions – Was justice served? How do we prevent this from ever happening again?
This is a thoughtful summary of some of what I think needs to be said about this (the following is from Rachel Maddow’s blog):
Johannes Mehserle was sentenced last Friday, and I’ve been struggling to form a coherent response ever since. Mehserle is the former Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) police officer convicted of involuntary manslaughter in July for the fatal shooting of unarmed BART rider Oscar Grant III during the wee hours of New Year’s Day, 2009.
Mehserle’s excuse for shooting Grant was, for many, quite literally unbelievable: he allegedly mistook his pistol for his Taser. Despite facing 14 years in prison, he received the minimum of two — with parole eligibility in seven months — mainly because the judge really believed that excuse. But in the three smartest takes on the sentencing that I’ve read since, it seems that isn’t even the point.
First, Atlantic writer Ta-Nehisi Coates offers his reasoning as to why he wasn’t outraged over Mehserle’s short sentence:
My sense is that Mehserle, in killing Oscar Grant, made an awful and sickening mistake. But I’m not sure what good comes out of sending him to jail for five or ten years… I think another argument for sentencing Mehserle to serious time is that a message needs to be sent to other cops that the society takes their crimes seriously. But that gets its backwards. It is a society that passes laws which send SWAT teams into gambling houses that is need of a message. These are the cops that we deserve. In that sense, I am not so disturbed that Oscar Grant’s killer will do little, if any, jail time. I am disturbed that this will happen again. I am disturbed that we are so fragile a people, that we know this, and that all we can do is look away.
Coates builds on Julianne Hing‘s reporting for ColorLines magazine, which posits that courtroom results are evidence that real justice for those like Oscar Grant can best be found in prevention of more Oscar Grants:
Prosecutions so often end in acquittal, for one — as the painful verdicts for the cops charged with attacking Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell, Abner Louima and Rodney King all illustrate. But more than that, organizers say the hard work of bringing about long-term change comes only from engaging in systemic overhauls and with sustained pressure on police departments to do preventative work. For that, people must be a steady presence at their local police departments’ public accountability meetings or in their local sheriff’s office.