If You Are Black and Poor, You Get Thrown in Jail — If You’re White or an Asian Tiger Mom, You Skate — The Case for Jury Nullification

01 February 2011

An African American mother was sentenced to jail because she tried to get her two children into a better school by lying about her address

It apparently is not enough that penitentiary sentences fall with egregious disproportion on people of African American descent.

Now we’re apparently (if the facts are as they have been reported) throwing African American mothers into jail for trying to better their children’s chances of breaking out of America’s cycle of racially-focused poverty.

Single-mom Kelley Williams-Bolar (a college student and teaching assistant with no criminal record) spent 9 days in a Summit County, Ohio jail for lying about her address so that her children could get into a decent school. She now has a felony on her record and will probably fail in getting into the teaching occupation that she has trained for.

She put her father’s address on the school forms, so that her children could escape the subsidized housing, crime ridden area of Akron where she lived. In her opinion, she resided in both places. Her two children attended the better school for two years.

In the end, the school district asserted that Williams-Bolar owed $30,500 in tuition and that she falsified records. Prosecutors charged Williams-Bolar with several felony counts of grand theft and tampering with records. The jury deliberated for over seven hours and eventually convicted her of two felony counts of tampering with records.

The facade of black on black prosecution

The prosecutor was black. So, Ms. Williams-Bolar deserved what she got, right?

Not exactly.

American law repeatedly oppresses the poor, and especially African Americans

Law is always an instrument of the status quo. When the status quo includes a significant element of racial and socioeconomic repression, law continues it.

A jury found Ms. Williams-Bolar guilty, as it no doubt should have according to Ohio statutes.

And that’s the point.

When people are trapped in bad circumstances, with no statistically probable way out, they often run afoul of laws that the rest of us either (a) don’t need to violate or (b) can escape prosecution and punishment for because we’re white and/or have money.

In this instance, Mr. Williams-Bolar presumably knew that her kids’ best way out of poverty was to obtain a decent education. But that was not likely to happen in the abysmally bad schools that characterize most poverty-laced school districts. The one she was avoiding tested below average. What parent wants to send her children to a below average school in a crime-prone neighborhood?

So Ms. Williams-Bolar summoned up her gumption and lied about her address. She and her dad got caught. Then she was treated to the absurdity of the richer school trying to charge her $30,000 for her effrontery in trying to climb out of poverty’s abyss.

A knife-edged irony

It apparently did not dawn on the school district or the prosecutor — whose brief courtroom video clip hints that he suffers from zealous self-righteousness — is that:

(a) claiming that Ms. Williams-Bolar stole four years of education (two years each times two kids) from the richer school

(b) merely demonstrates how unlikely it was that the educational system had invested proper effort in the school that Williams-Bolar children was trying to escape.

Richer neighborhoods have a richer tax base and usually have better schools. The “better” comes from a combination of financial resources and a culturally more establishment view of reality, which generally makes attaining economic and social success easier.

Were we to distribute resources more equally throughout each state, disparities might not be quite so obvious.

Alternatively, were we to give parents choices among schools, some of their children could escape bad financial and structural circumstances without necessarily redistributing rich neighborhoods' resources.

Take your pick.

I doubt we’re going to reform our elitist economic system, but the doctrine of jury nullification offers a way out from adding the wrongs that the criminal justice system piles on the repressed

Jury nullification simply means that jurors ignore the weight of evidence and/or the application of law to reach what they consider to be a more just verdict.

The doctrine is anathema to most courtrooms. But, realistically, it is the only way to assure fairness, when the criminal justice system is transparently used to keep people in their “places.”

When this nation finally cares more about justice and genuine democracy than it does about keeping large segments of the population down, we’ll see increasingly more nullification in our courtrooms.

Citations

Boyce Watkins, Mother Jailed for Sending Kids to Wrong School District, Dr. Boyce Watkins the People’s Scholar (23 January 2011)

Ed Meyer and Carol Biliczky, Kelley Williams-Bolar leaves jail but public outcry escalates, Ohio.com (26 January 2011)

Good Morning America, Ohio Mom Kelley Williams-Bolar Serves 10-Day Sentence, ABC News (26 January 2011)

Boyce Watkins, Kelley Williams-Bolar Update: Kelley Meets with Rev., Dr. Boyce Watkins the People’s Scholar (31 January 2011)

PeteFree.com

If You Are Black and Poor, You Get Thrown in Jail — If You’re White or an Asian Tiger Mom, You Skate — The Case for Jury Nullification