Raymond Towler is a better man than me … or you. He’s a black man who endured nearly 30 years of incarceration for the rape of a white 12-year-old girl, a rape he didn’t commit. In any prison in America that kind of charge — especially against a black man — ensures that the time served will be hard indeed.
Nonetheless, Towler emerged from his nightmarish ordeal amazingly unscathed psychologically, and totally free of bitterness. In interviews since his May 5th release he has repeatedly stated that he harbors no ill will towards those who mistakenly identified him as the perpetrator and then falsely testified against him in Court. He knows that he can’t get those lost years back so he simply wants to get on with his life. Talk about true grit.
I, on the other hand, would have been banging my head against the cell bars from morning till night … to the point where I became so crazed guards would have placed me in a rubber room — to spend all my days playing handball with my own shit. I’d have been driven as mad as a hatter. Once again, Towler is one strong, spiritual man.
Judge Eileen Gallagher’s courtroom, where I went to witness his release, was fairly crowded, but rather than sit in the jury box which had been designated for the press pool, I took a seat in the back row, near his family members. When the appointed time of 9 o’clock came and went (while Towler sat serenely at the defense table surrounded by a phalanx of lawyers) one family member commented to another, “You’d think that after wrongly imprisoning him for almost 30 years, they would at least start Court on time to let him go.” Indeed, while the criminal justice system is often quick to capture, prosecute and imprison … it’s very slow to release.
Albeit late, Judge Gallagher finally took the bench, asked Towler for his indulgence, and then ponderously recapped the case, ending with the evidence that exonerated the man who served the fourth-longest sentence of any innocent person ever freed in America by DNA.
Everyone — including the Judge — was teary-eyed over the freeing of an innocent man, but what she (or no one else connected to the criminal justice system for that matter) didn’t care to examine is … how did this injustice occur in the first place? Judge Gallagher, fine and fair jurist that she is, happens to be an integral part of the two-tiered criminal justice system that we have erected and maintained in America. Sadly, every criminal lawyer in the country knows the system is unfair … and most of them go along with it unquestioningly.
The obvious, pat, answer to Towler’s conviction is that the underage victims (as well as the adult eyewitnesses that placed him at the scene of the crime on that day) were simply wrong, innocently mistaken — end of story, right? Wrong.
A new book details how our highly vaulted criminal justice system came to be flawed … and how it allows (rather than protects against) such mistakes when the person standing at the Bar of Justice happens to be black or brown.
Indeed, it’s estimated that seven percent of all of the people behind bars in America are innocent … a figure that one prosecutor said is within “acceptable bounds.” Sure, seven percent doesn’t sound like all that many folks … unless of course you, or a loved one, are in that cohort of roughly 150,000 innocent souls still serving someone else’s time. And by simply extrapolating incarceration figures, it’s readily apparent the vast majority of those imprisoned innocents are persons of color.
An old joke in the black community goes: “We all look alike to white folks … that is, until they get on the witness stand. Then, they damn sure can positively I.D. us every time.”
The fact is, numerous tests over the last 30 years have proven again and again just how faulty eyewitness testimony can be, and, indeed, over 75 percent of the more than 200 people to date who have been cleared by DNA were convicted on wrongful eyewitness testimony. Which raises the question of how many more misidentified persons are rotting away in American prisons in cases where there is no DNA evidence available to free them?
We Americans love to congratulate ourselves on having the fairest legal system in the history of humankind, and, on paper it does indeed look pretty good — especially if you happen to be white. But the system that has always been relatively bad for blacks and browns has actually been changing for the worst over the past four decades, as Ohio State University Professor Michelle Alexander points out in her brilliant new book, “The New Jim Crow.”
Buttressing her arguments is another new Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Slavery By Another Name,” by Wall Street Journal bureau chief Douglas A. Blackmon. And if you have the stomach for it, also read “Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire,” by Robert Perkinson. It’s so brutal I can only handle it in small doses, yet it sits there by my bedside, demanding, in all fairness, to be read. But let’s face it … some people don’t want to know the horrible truth about justice and incarceration American style; it’s knowledge that would make many too uncomfortable, and to know about the faults would require efforts at systemic change … or at least one would hope or imagine.
Just how fair can an admittedly adversarial criminal justice system be when one side (the State) has unlimited funds and resources, and the other side — the defendant — often has to rely on notoriously under-paid and over-worked public defenders? With these kinds of inequities still firmly in place what happened to Raymond Towler 30 years ago still can (and does) happen today — especially if your skin is black or brown.
After two weeks without solving the rape case, Metroparks rangers were, in all probability, beginning to feel the heat. Not many African-Americans visited the Rocky River Reservation (where the crime occurred) back in the 80s, so when Towler showed up … he was “it.” Crime solved, case closed, everyone could go back to sleep at night secure in the fact justice had been squarely done.
But, instead, it was injustice that was done because we have a system that, by design, allows such things to happen. The dice have been loaded, the deck has been stacked, and the game-table has been rigged against blacks since Emancipation, and all of the players in this diabolical criminal justice scheme — from police, to prosecutors, to judges, and yes, even defense attorneys — know it. Constitutional protections routinely accorded to whites are just as routinely denied blacks and browns in America.
Do undereducated and unemployed blacks and browns commit more crimes? Of course, but in nowhere close to the numbers by which persons of color are overrepresented in the carceral population, and Professor Alexander, with irrefutable proof, documents how the American criminal justice system has been getting this neat bit of legerdemain off. A first-rate researcher, she proves that blacks and browns are routinely going to prison for “crimes” that whites routinely get a pass on … especially petty drug crimes (which make up the bulk of prison populations). However, as she points out, selective enforcement is common in other areas of policing as well.
And the fact that most of the misidentified people released from prison in America — due to DNA or other reasons — are persons of color should give all lovers of liberty pause because these statistics clearly demonstrate that the system is in dire need of repair.
Granted, the prosecutors in the Towler case bent over backwards to get the DNA testing done to prove his innocence, but other prosecutors, 30 years ago, bent over backwards to insure that the rape case against him was quickly closed and marked “solved” — the actual facts be damned.
Additionally, some folks can still recall that a little over a decade ago another man, Michael Green, was freed in the exact same manner for the exact same crime, yet, when it came time for him to collect the money owed to him from the state for false incarceration, the prosecutor, in cahoots with the Ohio Attorney General, threw up all kinds of roadblocks and delaying tactics. We can only hope that doesn’t occur again with Towler.
The real kicker is, even though Green was proven to be 100 percent innocent, he says that he still was treated by most of society as if he were guilty and found it virtually impossible to get any kind of decent job.
As of this writing, no word of any apology being proffered from the people whose inaccurate testimony caused Towler, an innocent man, to spend over half of his life behind bars — but no one should be surprised.
I do, however, wish that Towler didn’t take this quite so well. I’m certainly thankful that he doesn’t appear to be damaged psychologically, but I wish he was more angered … a bit more outraged. Simply because his equanimity allows those responsible for his years of illegal incarceration off the hook far too easy; I’m concerned it makes prosecutors more inclined to be careless with someone else’s freedom — too willing to allow this to happen to other innocent men — mostly black and brown– again and again.
If the system wasn’t racially rigged, the “mistake” made against Raymond Towler no doubt would have been caught and corrected early on… and an innocent man would not have spent close to the last 30 years behind bars.
From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available again in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author by visiting http://www.frombehindthewall.com.
2 Responses to “Mansfield: Free at Last!”
Victor Lucas
Thanks for insightful commentary on the release of Raymond Towler.
I too envy Towler’s ability to leave bitterness and resentment behind.
Jack McGuane
Your comment about Raymond Towler’s incarceration is, as usual, right on. What you didn’t touch on is Towler’s conviction that he has freed himself from his (unjust) past and decided to live the life he’s got. He may have discovered this too-good-to-be-true truth many years before he was set free. He’s become a veteran practictioner of the power of forgiveness. I recognize him.