Brownsville Middle School students visiting the Police Academy recently got a stark warning from recruit Albert Hightower: “I have friends who’s dead; I have friends who’s in jail…Do not, do not let the environment you’re in right now dictate what you become,” Hightower said, drawing on his own experiences growing up near Brownsville, in Liberty City.
These 40 sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders had come downtown on a field trip that organizers hoped would help point the way to a career as a cop or a lawyer. Yet as Hightower’s warning suggests, the day also served as a reminder of the fact that for many young people in Brownsville the first exposure to the American justice system comes in a very different light.
“I want them to know what a black man in a suit looks like,” said Marlon Hill, an attorney with the firm Hamilton, Miller and Birthisel, who has worked with Brownsville Middle School for the past two years.
Even taking in the sights on Northwest Third Street seemed to offer a change in perspective. “I feel like I’m in New York,” one seventh grader said, looking up towards the surrounding skyscrapers as he crossed the street on the way to the Miami-Dade Children’s Courthouse. In the elevator, another student said he’d never been as high as the ninth floor.
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Hill, who was born in Jamaica and attended high school in South Miami-Dade, said, “Middle school can definitely be a fork in the road." He explained that his firm chose to work with this age group specifically for that reason: “If you take the wrong exit, it’s hard to get it back.”
The field trip’s main event was a mock trial in the courtroom of Juvenile Court Judge Orlando Prescott. Students took their places as members of the jury and Judge Prescott ceded his robe to a 14-year-old.
What do we as a community do ... to help students see the possibility of a path? - Izegbe Onyango
Marlon Hill read the facts of the case.”After school on a sunny spring day, King and Cory are riding their bikes down 24th Avenue near Brownsville Middle School,” he began. Before long, the boys in this scenario had been stopped, questioned and arrested for shoplifting—all without being read their Miranda rights.
As testimony unfolded, lawyers from Hill’s firm coached the middle-school prosecutors along in a whisper— “At no point before the admission of guilt were the boys in custody,” one said. “Wait, what?” the seventh grade prosecutor replied.
The state was trying to argue that the boys had had the right to leave at any time while the officer was questioning them. Had they left, prosecutors tried to point out, they could have avoided saying anything incriminating. “Were the two suspects free to leave?” the prosecutor wanted to know.
There was a pause. “Ummmm, no!”
“Why did you say that?” a prosecutor shot back. “Cuz they was lying to me,” the officer replied matter-of-factly.
There’s a basic misunderstanding here about what “custody” is, and about what your rights are when you’re stopped by the police. In the mock trial scenario, an officer had questioned the two kids for 15 minutes before one of them finally admitted to shoplifting. A prosecutor might reasonably expect the officer to say the suspects had been free to go all along, but to a 12-year-old boy from Brownsville, that’s not the way it looked at all.
For the kids who made up the jury, the decision came down to this: If the cop didn’t read the suspects their rights, then they had to let them go.
Some students saw other problems with the case. “Let me tell you, I just talked to a student,” said chaperone Izegbe Onyango afterwards. “And I asked, ‘Hey, did you see, was justice served here today, and she said ‘no!’
The student agreed with the not-guilty verdict; she thought the state had tampered with the witness list. “Because the store clerk said there were no witnesses beside her…and all of a sudden there was this witness. The neighbor just came out of nowhere."
Onyango said this mock trial wasn’t that student’s first time in a courtroom. “I asked her, ‘Have you been in a court before?’ She said ‘yes.’ I said, ‘Did you receive justice then?’ And she said ‘No.’”
“So the question is, what do we do as a community to be able to maneuver within a system where there has been gross injustice…and then to be able to, to help the students see the possibility of a path.
In Judge Prescott’s courtroom, that path seemed clear, at least for the day. “This is not a mock courtroom; this is the courtroom," Prescott said as he gave the students their send-off. “That young man sat in the seat to be occupied by the judge. And I wanted you to notice something—that once I put the robe on him, did you see how he changed? He became the part. And that’s exactly what I want for each and every one of you."
