The year was 2007, and after being pulled from school early, I was sitting in a restaurant across from my mother, father and grandmother. I knew something was horribly wrong when I looked into my grandmother’s eyes and saw pain — an intense distress I had never seen before. My parents both retained their composure, but for whose sake I will never know.
It was crushing to be so in the dark about something that was obviously hurting my family. After a long silence, the first words out of my mother’s mouth were, “Ian. You need to remain calm. Your uncle was in an accident. We don’t know where he is, so we are going up to Seattle to handle it.”
Later that day, after four hours of driving with frantic calls between my mom and my aunt, we found out that my uncle had been savagely beaten by the Seattle Police Department and was in King County lockup. The shock of the situation had put me in an emotional downward spiral, because my uncle was and still is one of the gentlest people I know, and he has never been in trouble like this.
Three days passed and we had still not seen him. The only way we knew he was even alive was that a nurse at the medical ward had sneaked him a cell phone. He had been refusing pain medication for fear that it would lead to the police killing him. His arraignment was that day and he was being charged with assault on an officer.
A glass wall separated the court from the spectators. There were more than 60 of us packed into the cramped room, the most that had ever shown up in support of a defendant at that court. We waited. Would we even recognize him?
The door opened and he stepped into the courtroom. In his orange jumpsuit, his face swollen and bruised with 12 staples holding together the wound in his skull where four officers had beaten him with flashlights after he had fallen unconscious, he appeared as a stranger to me. The look of humiliation in his eyes was something I will never forget.
I lost my composure to the point where I had to be removed from the room. His best friend, Randy, whom I had known my whole life, took me outside and embraced me in shared sorrow.
I would learn later, based on numerous eyewitness accounts, that Randy and my uncle had been together@@with whom? Randy?@@, working on a sculpture for Seattle City Hall late into the night when the police were called for a noise complaint. Two cars and at least eight officers arrived on the scene. This was not a noise complaint; they were there to hurt someone. My uncle came out of the studio and the beating began almost immediately. They hit him with nightsticks, and as he broke free and started running down an alley, they hit him with a stun gun four times. He went down, and when they caught up to him they beat him to unconsciousness and didn’t call in an ambulance for more than 20 minutes after that.
That night, they cracked his skull and bruised his ribs, but what I can never forgive them for is breaking his spirit. He is still my hero, but something changed in him that night. Long after the charges against him were dropped, he deals with post-traumatic stress. The only reason he was able to fight the charges against him was that he had the financial connections to pay the $100,000 in legal fees. Many citizens without these connections end up in prison on a plea deal because it is the best deal they can afford. Apparently justice is something that has to be bought.
This was one of the most formative experiences of my life and cemented my view of the American judicial system. I am no longer under the illusion that it operates with a series of checks and balances. Far too often, the police in any state can do what they want to whomever they want with no repercussions beyond a paid leave of absence. Only when brutality is caught on camera, as it was in the recent Kelly Thomas incident (where Fullerton Police beat a homeless man to death), is law enforcement held to any standard of ethics. Even then, I believe that action was only taken because the victim’s father was an ex-police officer and because the whole beating was caught on video camera.@@http://morallowground.com/2011/07/28/kelly-thomas-homeless-schizophrenic-beaten-to-death-by-fullerton-ca-police-victims-ex-cop-father-calls-it-cold-blooded-murder/@@
For every innocent man we put behind bars, and even more for every official execution within the United States, we prove to the world that we have no moral standing. We point to China, Russia and Middle Eastern regimes when we discuss secret prisons, barbaric punishments and the faults in the rule of law, but we need to focus the lens of scrutiny back on ourselves. Do we not imprison people without due process? Do we not torture? Do we not kill? It is a shame that in such a great country, we still employ Draconian punishments the rest of the westernized world has long since banned.
I call for an end to this barbarism. We must hold the system to the same standards it holds on us. We must use the tools we have such as the camera, the voice recorder and the Internet to capture truth and to expose abuse. Be not afraid because we deserve a more perfect union, but in order to ensure that happens we must not be afraid to act in our own defense. In one way or another, we are all my uncle. We are all Thomas Kelly.