Good Kids, Bad City~A Story of Race and Wrongful Conviction in America by Kyle Swenson

Author:Kyle Swenson [Swenson, Kyle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1250120233
Amazon: B078X1NXY7
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2019-02-12T00:00:00+00:00

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About three months after I first met Kwame, I was standing on the edge of a weed-spewing lot on East Ninety-second Street. The street was a quick two-block run of houses north of St. Clair in Glenville. The buildings still standing were bled dry from neglect. Porches melted into overgrown lawns. Graffiti-striped cardboard covered many windows. The power lines stitching the houses together overhead dripped like old shoelaces.

I was the only white person within sight, likely the only white person in a two-mile radius. Young black men in dreads and sweatpants were tossing hard eyefucks in my general direction, but no one spoke to me. If the sight of a twenty-five-year-old paleface geek with a notebook in his hand was usually enough to draw curiosity on this block, today it was losing out to what was happening in the field.

A circle of black women, their ages running from teens to late sixties, held hands in a circle, screaming into the mild afternoon. Each pair of arms flung up and down with no concern about syncing with their neighbor, as if a different electrical bolt jerked each limb. Rick Ross charged out of the stereo speakers of a parked car, laying an incongruous Miami-booty-bass backdrop against hard grief pooling in the dead field.

On paper this was a protest. Until a month ago, a thirty-six-year-old black man named Jamelle had lived with his girlfriend and five kids a few houses away. He’d grown up nearby, and like many guys in the neighborhood, he was trailed by a handful of felony drug convictions. Recently he’d been trying to stay straight. One evening in April, he got into a fight with a neighbor. Over what, stories shifted. But the conflict ended with the neighbor unloading eighteen bullets into Jamelle. Cleveland police arrested the shooter. The Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office filed murder charges. But just when it seemed as if the societal machinery designed to right a criminal wrong was working smoothly, the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office dropped the charges. The shooter walked. The reason: the Castle Doctrine, a stand-your-ground-style law cooked up by the National Rifle Association and spoon-fed to the Republican-controlled state legislature, part of the national creep to expand gun laws. Ohio had embraced the statute; because Jamelle had technically fallen in the shooter’s house, the state felt there was no grounds for prosecution. Case closed.1

This was understandably shocking to the victim’s family. They couldn’t arrange their grief in a way to provide for such an unexpected curveball, and it soon grew into flabbergasted rage. To draw attention to the case, the dead man’s bereaved family had asked friends and neighbors to come out for a show of outrage this afternoon. But the political theater quickly ran off elsewhere.

From the brief conversations I had before the circle formed up, I learned that most of these women—and only women came—had seen random violence sweep away pieces of their lives. The uniform chorus of chants that started the rally soon splintered into

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