By Nkechi Taifa, Esq.— The godsend of the granting of compassionate release to William Underwood today is a matter of preparation and persistence meeting opportunity. The blessing is the story of a family that never gave up. Lawyers who were relentless. The power of strange bedfellows. And it is a story of the constant demand for justice. William Underwood is a devoted father of four, a grandfather and a former…
By Nkechi Taifa— The terror Blacks feel is in our bones. For me, it began when white storm clouds of terror hung over the home of Mose Wright late one August night in 1955, when white, armed terrorists demanded his great-nephew, 14-year-old Emmett Till, be handed over to them. I was scarcely eight months old. Young Emmett had made the mistake of being from Chicago and, not heeding “The Talk” his…
By Nkechi Taifa, Esq.— WASHINGTON (Trice Edney News Wire) — I am at Ground Zero. My law degree cannot protect me. My fancy address cannot protect me. My radio appearances and Zoom book tour cannot protect me. I check with, and for, my daughter against this madness as we all should the way the Black Power Movement taught me. On the 24-hour cable television there are many references to how the…
By Nkechi Taifa — Time can be both friend and enemy, although it teaches us so much in either identity. I was in my first year of evening law school when Alicia Garza, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, was born. Ronald Reagan was president and I was working fulltime during the day for an anti-apartheid organization under the tutelage of Dr. Jean Sindab, a badass, brilliant Black woman —…
By Nkechi Taifa, Esq — We cannot understand the current moment without viewing it with a historical lens. After the death of Justice Thurgood Marshall, there was a gaping hole in the U.S. Supreme Court. The court lost a defender of justice, and African Americans and people of color lost a champion for civil rights. History seems destined to repeat itself: Just as conservative Clarence Thomas replaced civil rights icon…
By Attny. Nkechi Taifa — Congressman John Conyers, during the 2014 Congressional Black Caucus plenary on reparations which you chaired, I spoke of the words of Mamie Till Mobley, the mother of 14-year-old Emmett Till who in 1955 was abducted by whites and thrown into Mississippi’s Tallahatchie River. The only way her son’s beaten and horribly disfigured body could be identified was by a ring he wore on a finger….
By Nkechi Taifa and Mark Osler — As politicians and office-holders trot out their annual tributes to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., beware of a big lie that has too often been front and center in these speeches. In short, it is this: That there was racism in America, that Dr. King came and solved the problem, and now we are lucky to live in a post-racial America. This narrative…
By Nkechi Taifa — President Obama changed 46 lives on Monday, commuting the prison terms of individuals who had been locked away serving long sentences for low-level, nonviolent offenses. “These men and women were not hardened criminals. But the overwhelming majority of them had been sentenced to at least 20 years—14 of them had been sentenced to life—for nonviolent drug offenses,” the president said in making the announcement. “Their punishments…
From the kangaroo courts and lynching laws of yesterday to the still lingering crack vs. powder-cocaine disparity today, miscarriages of justice have been an ever-present feature of the U.S. criminal punishment system.
By Nkechi Taifa — Clemency not only provides a measure of justice for people who have been unnecessarily incarcerated, it curbs huge costs to taxpayers. In December, President Obama commuted the sentences of eight people serving harsh prison terms on crack-cocaine convictions. Why? Until recently, those who possessed just five grams of crack cocaine received the same five-year sentence as those who distributed 500 grams of powder cocaine; those who…
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