BlackPerspective.net
Discussing the Diaspora as seen through an internal Black lens
How Drug Conspiracy Laws Unfairly Incarcerate Black Women
December 2nd, 2009
Over charging in the legal (not justice) system has become a normative part of prosecution. An act that is in fact misconduct is accepted standard practice. It quite often disregards justice and truth for results; that being successful prosecutions.
In the following article BlackPressUsa.com explores the way in which Black women are often effected by this and other tangent prosecutorial practices.
The Cost of Incarceration – PART III: The Conspiracy Charge Traps Women
by Patrice Gaines
NNPA Contributing Writer
“The Cost of Incarceration” is an eight-part occasional series written by Patrice Gaines, former Washington Post reporter; author and co-founder of The Brown Angel Center, a program in Charlotte, N.C. that helps formerly incarcerated women become financially independent. Gaines received a 2009 Soros Justice Media Fellowship from the Open Society Institute to research and write articles on the impact of mass incarceration on the Black community. The National Newspaper Publishers Association News Service has agreed to make this exclusive series available to its membership of more than 200 Black-owned newspapers.
(NNPA) - Charlie Mae Mays is 77. She has been diagnosed with lung cancer but it is in remission.
Of course, that makes her happy. But she measures her life in terms of whether or not she will one day see her daughter walk out of prison free.
Mays, who lives in Detroit, has four children. Her daughter Marion “Pete” Mays lives with her. Charlie Mae Mays also has two children who were sentenced in the same drug case in 1993. This story is about one of them, her oldest daughter Michelle, and the policy of charging people with “conspiracy.” Mays’s son Marcel will be paroled next year after serving 18 years. Michelle, on the other hand, is serving two life sentences plus 50 years without parole. She is one of thousands of women some call a victim of a law that created the “girlfriend problem.”
“Women romantically involved with drug-involved men often get caught in the conspiracy net cast by the war on drugs, many times receiving harsher sentences than the drug kingpins,” says Nkechi Taifa, Senior Policy Analyst for the Open Society Institute (OSI), a private grant-making foundation that aims to shape public policy regarding issues such as human rights and social reform.
This kind of prosecution of women does not allow a judge or jury to take into consideration the reasons why a woman may remain silent or stay with a drug dealer. The court ignores factors like domestic violence, economic dependence, or disability that makes one reliant on someone to provide financial support.
Michelle West was a single mom with a nine-year-old daughter. She once dated and lived with Olee Wonzo Robinson, a man police said was a drug dealer.
West and her family say he was physically and verbally abusive to her. Finally, she left and moved in with her mother.
“She was trying to go on with her life,” her mother remembers.
A couple of years later police came knocking. Michelle says they threatened her with drug charges if she didn’t cooperate in their investigation of her ex-boyfriend. She was petrified because her ex had warned her he would kill her daughter and mother if she ever talked to police, she says.
West was convicted of charges that include conspiracy to distribute controlled substances and aiding and abetting in drug-related homicide. Witnesses testified that West did whatever Robinson ordered her to do. She denies having anything to do with a murder or drug dealing. One of the informants who testified against her was the triggerman in the murder and received immunity for his testimony. West maintained her innocence. Still, she received the same sentence as her ex-boyfriend.
Watch this PBS Frontline Documentary on how overcharging forces the dilemma of plea bargaining for crimes one didn’t commit to stave off dramatic jail time. The doc is called The Plea.
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Yobachi Boswell is creator and publisher of BlackPerspecitve.net. I’m a writer, activist and political watcher based in Nashville, Tennessee. I’ve also been know to do some spoken word and MCing in my day.
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