The Lifer and the Lawyer by George Critchlow

Author:George Critchlow [Critchlow, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781725278387
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Published: 2020-12-14T19:51:45+00:00

Chapter 20

“. . . nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

—Fourteenth Amendment, US Constitution

From the beginning of the case, Tim and I considered it obvious that our client should not and could not be tried in Franklin County. The prospect for assembling an impartial, untainted jury was zero. Anderson’s name, face, and history had been plastered on pages of the newspaper and recycled on repeated television news broadcasts over several months. He was widely known as a convicted felon from Chicago who now resided in the state penitentiary because of pleading guilty to various crimes in Benton County. The family he was accused of terrorizing in Franklin County was a respected salt-of the-earth Pasco clan whose kinship with the community ran deep. People who knew nothing about the case would have difficulty keeping their minds open, much less those who already reviled Anderson and looked forward to his eternal damnation. Every criminal defense lawyer knows it is one thing to talk about impartial justice and the presumption of innocence; it is another thing to achieve it in practice.

There was another factor that convinced me the case should not be tried in Pasco. Race. African American people lived in Pasco, yes, but they rarely showed up on jury panels. And the people who did serve on juries were frequently the kind of community-minded Caucasians who took pride in knowing what was best for black folks. Some might interpret this last comment as nothing more than an expression of hypercritical liberal bias, but I was not a newcomer to the area, and I knew something about the predilection of Franklin County jurors. In fact, the lesson I had learned about Franklin County jurors was fresh in mind from a recent case I had tried in that venue.

* * * *

Sam and Dorothy were born, raised and married—to one another—in early twentieth-century Mississippi. Like many African Americans, including Michael Anderson’s ancestors, they lived in rural poverty with little chance of rising above the station assigned by history and culture to poor and poorly educated southern blacks. They decided to join the migration out of the South to northern venues they believed would provide economic opportunity and an escape from pervasive discrimination. Sam heard there were good railroad jobs in the Northwest, so he brought Dorothy to Pasco just after serving with the US Army in the European theater during World War II. Sam worked as a laborer in the old railroad roundhouse that repositioned locomotives back when Pasco was an important railroad hub. The job was steady, and it supported the couple’s growing family.

Living in Pasco offered more opportunity than Mississippi, but post-war Pasco for African Americans was not a Norman Rockwell picture of the American dream. Pasco was a segregated town where custom and practice consigned blacks to live in several blocks of low-income rentals and modest homes on the city’s east side.

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