Real Prison Issues

A deputy put the barrel of his gun into a man's mouth and pulled the trigger. It clicked. So he racked the slide and pulled it again. Michael Jenkins lived. This was JANUARY 2023. Braxton, Mississippi. 24 January 2023. A white neighbour telephoned the police to report that two Black men were at a house with a white woman. The homeowner, Kristi Walley, was a childhood friend of one of them. She was in hospital at the time. Six officers came. Five were Rankin County sheriff's deputies. The sixth was an off-duty officer from another force. They broke the front door down. They had no warrant. They called themselves the Goon Squad. Over roughly ninety minutes they handcuffed Michael Jenkins and Eddie Parker, beat them, used tasers on them repeatedly, poured liquids over them, sexually assaulted Parker with an object, and threatened them with rape. They used racial slurs throughout and told the men to go back to Jackson — to their side of the river. Then Hunter Elward put his service weapon in Michael Jenkins's mouth for what the officers later described as a mock execution. The first pull clicked. He racked the slide and pulled again. The round tore through Jenkins's tongue and shattered his jaw. He survived. Read the date again. The twenty-fourth of January, two thousand and twenty-three. Not 1963. Not Mississippi in the era your grandmother remembers. Three years ago, in a house, by men in uniform, who had a name for themselves. What they did next is at nine this morning, and it is arguably worse.

He went into a North Carolina prison in 1976 and came out in 2020. 44 years. Ronnie Long was tried by an all-white jury in front of an all-white courtroom, convicted, and sentenced to two life terms. The evidence that cleared him had been sitting in a police file the whole time. Concord, North Carolina. He was 20, and he was accused of raping a white widow — the wife of a local textile executive. The jury was all white. The judge ordered the jury pool assembled in a way that produced it. Long's lawyers objected and were overruled. Here is what the state had, and did not disclose: Forty-three fingerprints were lifted at the scene. None of them were his. The defence was not told. A rape kit had been collected. Hair and other evidence had been gathered and sent for analysis. Reports existed. The defence was not told, and much of the material later could not be found. The victim had initially failed to identify him, and the circumstances of the identification she eventually made were deeply questionable. He was convicted in 1976 and spent the next four and a half decades filing. Appeal after appeal, denied. For decades, courts told him his claims were procedurally too late — which is to say, he was too slow to complain about evidence nobody had told him existed. In August 2020 the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, sitting as a full court, vacated his conviction and described the state's conduct as an extraordinary withholding of evidence. He walked out that month, aged 64. North Carolina's governor pardoned him. He received the state's maximum wrongful-conviction payment — which is capped at $750,000. For forty-four years. That is about seventeen thousand dollars a year. He had been inside longer than the lawyers who finally freed him had been alive.