Wrongful convictions are not rare--this impacts more community members than you think. Here's a way you can protect yourself.

VIDEO DESCRIPTION: Malik Morris, a Black Indigenous man with long natural hair slicked back into an afro puff ponytail. He stands in front of a white wall while wearing a black short shirt and signing. He signs in Black ASL.

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Video Title: HEARD Statement on Wrongful Convictions of Black Disabled/Deaf People
@behearddc

English ASL transcript:

Wrongful convictions are not uncommon.

Some of the common reasons wrongful convictions happen are eyewitness misidentification; police and prosecutor misconduct or mistake; old or improper science; false or forced confessions; and because of plea agreements.

Racism, classism, ableism and other oppressions play a huge role in wrongful convictions. In the 2017 report, Race and Wrongful Conviction in the United States, the National Registry of Exonerations notes that Black people represent just 13% of the U.S. population, but represent the majority of innocent defendants who are wrongfully convicted—with Black people accounting for 47% of the 1,900 exonerations listed in the National Registry of Exonerations as of October 2016 (Gross, et al., 2017). The report also notes that Black people are wrongfully convicted more often and exonerated less often due to systemic and structural racism throughout the criminal legal system.

Disabled people, including deaf people, have a much higher risk of wrongful conviction than non-disabled people. Deaf people are more likely to be wrongfully arrested. Once arrested and incarcerated, deaf people are less likely to be provided access to effective communication and support from attorneys and advocates due to barriers to communication access in the legal profession and in prisons. Some of these barriers include police, attorneys, judges, juries not understanding disability/deaf cultures and communication; unqualified people, including law enforcement and children, being used to “interpret”; most jails and prisons still not providing videophones, interpreters or other accommodations and auxiliary aids making it impossible for deaf people to communicate with their attorneys, maintain their mental and linguistic capabilities, or to get support from advocates who do understand deaf/disability cultures.

This means that the risk of wrongful conviction for Black disabled/deaf people is exponentially higher than white deaf/disabled people or than abled/hearing Black people, for instance.
HEARD has been investigating countless deaf people’s wrongful conviction cases for over a decade—mostly deafdisabled people. HEARD has noticed that in each of these cases, almost every step of the legal process is tainted because of systemic ableism within policing and legal systems. There are often numerous cross-cultural miscommunications and misunderstandings on top of the other factors that lead to wrongful convictions.

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Black screen with white words: One way you can protect yourself
Video Description: A young light skinned latinx person appeared with a brown hair bun. wearing a black short shirt standing behind a white wall using ASL.

ASL transcript:

HEARD strongly urges all people to NOT talk to police during interviews and interrogations. Asserting your Constitutional rights to remain silent and demand an attorney is the first step in protecting yourself from wrongful convictions and to protect your right to the best chance at succeeding in your case. It’s difficult but very important HEARD also urges people to NOT sign any documents police show and to demand an attorney immediately. Even if police can sign your language, or if police provide interpreters, deaf people should continue to assert their right to remain silent and to an attorney. Stay tuned for a future vlog on this topic!

Attorneys also must provide qualified interpreters and other accommodations so attorneys and clients can effectively communicate confidentially OUTSIDE of the presence of law enforcement. HEARD also works to educate attorneys and judges about these issues but we recognize that these problems are systemic within the legal system so will not simply disappear. So all deaf/disabled communities must be aware of the dangers that the criminal legal system poses and try their best to protect themselves.
HEARD has ASL information about wrongful convictions of deaf/disabled people on all of our social media accounts. We also plan to host more online roundtable conversations on deaf wrongful conviction cases in ASL.

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RESOURCES

HEARD infographic on wrongful convictions of deaf/disabled people:
ASL: bit.ly/deafwrongfulconvictionASL
English: bit.ly/deafwrongfulconvictionEnglish
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#DeafWrongfulConviction
#WrongfulConviction
#DisabilitySolidarity
#BlackLivesMatter
#BlackDisabledLivesMatter

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Facebook.com/hearddc
Twitter: @behearddc
www.behearddc.org

TRUTH
​
We are experiencing centuries of criminalization and diagnosing of a whole peoples’ rational responses to violence and terror as criminal, insane, problematic. We have been expertly gaslit for generations.
The genesis of our [re]actions are clear. We are human. We are Black. Survival is in our spirit, rebellion in our blood.  

What is not clear is how after centuries of Black folks holding, living and surviving through the same terrors over and over again, white supremacists are still telling us to teach our children how to try not to get killed instead of teaching theirs how not to kill. Their provocation has been intentionally skewed for generations. Where they should be asking “why’d we hunt, shoot, noose, kill?”, they instead ask “why’d they run, retaliate and resist?” 

We run because we see justified Black people stand their ground and die on it too.

We resist because we see what happens to those who don't.

We run because we have a strong suspicion and sufficient evidence to prove that either way, white supremacy’ll kill us.

We resist because of generations of white supremacist harassment, violence, and terror.

We run in hopes that, after centuries of running, they will be reminded of our humanity--that we feel, love, and want to live.
​
We resist because we know they cannot and possibly never will be able to see our humanity.

Our [e]motions are understandable and justified, and our [re]actions are righteous attempts to unwrite our fates and secure some semblance of freedom--to circumvent their unique brand of life threatening and death dealing “justice.” 

There is no justice in their “justice.” Of this we have been assured.

HUMANITY. FEELING.​

I just got off of work officer
I grew up in church officer
Loosen the cuffs for me, that shit kind of hurt officer
No question at all, you put my face in the dirt officer
Why it feel like death and like I'm 'bout to get murked officer?
I ain't packin' nothin', told that shit to the first officer
You stoppin' me 'cause you enjoyin' the perks officer?
Please let me go, my baby 'bout to give birth officer
Now you got yo' foot on my back and yo' heat on my head
Spit in my face, that's worse than puttin' feet on my bed
All for a quota, look how yo' people treat me for bread
Innocent man, so you shoot me and leave me for dead
. . . 
That's how you gon' act boy?
Wish I had my strap boy!
Wish I knew that y'all be blackin' out 'cause I'm a Black boy
Black skin rappin' for the Blacks, you callin' that noise?
Point the gun at my head and then you tell me, act poised
 . . . 
Yo' gun out, and you shootin' 'cause I scared you?
Well if you get to shoot 'cause you scared, nigga I'm scared too!
Why we can't be equal homie?
Why my movie can't be long enough to see the sequel homie?
 . . . 
Damn, it's like how I'm s'posed to love y'all?
When all you do is act like no one is above y'all
And now I'm feelin' like how much do that love cost?
Instead of real love, it really feel like love lost
I'll die for my freedom, let's get real for it
It's what it's like when you Black, and you get killed for it
- JAG, 2018

There is a feeling. 

It is a feeling that has yet to be named. 

If you are Black in the united states, you likely know this feeling all too well. This feeling is our unconsented to companion. It is the feeling that comes from knowing that our lives are limited and our deaths assured by factors wholly outside of our control. There is a specific variant of this feeling related to police/vigilantes.

For some, it is a full body pause, heart palpitations and brain revs when we see a police officer or police cruiser lights behind us. It’s the release-of-terror breath we take when cops pass us by coupled with dis-ease we feel for whoever will actually have to encounter them. For many, it is a momentary terror when we hear police sirens on the radio and relief tinged with annoyance that a Black artist would be so insensitive as to invoke such a nerve-racking sound. For others, it is knots in our stomach when our teen gets into the car to head to school—part fear of car accidents but a large part fear of cop "incidents." For others it is an uncontainable panicked upset when our curious little children touch anything at a store. For others still, it is seething anger and a rage-filled resignation to the end--a preparation for inevitable dehumanizing and deadly encounters with police and all their attendant systems.
 
We internalize very early on that any and every encounter with a cop/vigilante could be our last, so we do everything and anything to increase our odds of survival by decreasing all opportunities for them to find reason to interrupt our lives. We are very clear that our conduct is not the determining factor of our survival. 
​
In the face of white supremacist terror we can’t show strength or vulnerability, fear or calm, confidence or desperation, humor and wit, or confusion, even. What remains of us then? The mythical hulking horror white supremacist imaginations dream us to be. Figments of their imaginations paint us as black devils and them as saviors of whitekind. 
 
We are not human in the wild imaginations of the “law” and nothing can change this. Not age, circumstance, response, upbringing, degrees earned, “talks” had, respect ingrained or offered. Nothing. 

​It is a vicious cycle. They execute us so often that we can’t keep pace. We witness our murders for generations—each generation enduring its own unique brand of Black death as sport and spectacle. We educate our children about the high probability of being murdered for behaving normally, responding normally, being themselves. We teach our children to dissociate just to get home safely—to fight their rational and reasonable responses to white supremacist abuse, terror and violence. Their and our anxiety and hypervigilance increase. Our ability to put our natural responses aside decreases as the terror of knowing that our fate is in ruthless blood-stained hands increases. If somehow our lifelong training is overhauled by our natural instincts, we get blamed for the gruesome, bloody aftermath. If we are able to heed our lifelong trainings and still end up dead, we are blamed for our deaths still. 

We can’t win and every part of us knows it.

There is something perverse, pathological and unspeakably inhumane about a society that requires an entire group of people to dissociate just to survive. 

White supremacy, anti-Black racism, and racial terror—which includes but is not limited to police/vigilante violence and terror—has led to generations of unnamed racism-based stress and trauma. This racism-based stress and trauma leads to and exacerbates anxiety, depression, heart conditions, and countless other disabilities. This feeling, if felt by people cloaked in whiteness, would be validated, named a “disability,” and accommodated. But this feeling has no name precisely because we live in a society where Black humanity is denied, Black emotions dismissed, Black pain and terror discredited. 

This feeling kills us slow while white ships, whips, nooses, chains, displacement, extraction, exploitation, experiments, hospitals, neglect, ego, rage and triggers kill us fast. Meanwhile, society continues to question those of us who run or “resist” while ignoring the mental, emotional, physical and social burden Black people carry due to unyielding state violence against Black peoples. It is exceedingly rare to find a Black person in the united states who does not have this experience, these feelings.

Black people in the united states have always experienced Perpetual Traumatic Racism Based Stress. This is not a disorder. It is the ordered, legitimate and objectively reasonable response to centuries of virulent anti-Black racism.

The state uses our rational response to generations of its terror to justify our deaths  and executions. In the context of modern police/vigilante violence, viral lynching videos also help enshrine the disregard and disrespect shown to our loved ones in their final moments. 

Murderer always made victim. 
Victim always made menace. 
Murderers always excused. 
Victims always condemned.
Terror rises. 
Executions ensue.
Terror-rising.

Our legitimate chronic fear of deprivation of life and freedom leads to near-constant vigilance, stress and anxiety. Our psychological, emotional, spiritual and physical selves can’t help but be adversely affected as they work triple over time to save us.  

FEAR

Mommas been cryin' and they gon' keep cryin'
Black folk been dyin' and they gon' keep dyin'
Police been firin' and they gon' keep firin'
The government been lyin' and they gon' keep lyin'
Propaganda news channels, that shit is all for show
Camera phone videos is like all we know
Diluting what an eye witness might really say
Because the whole world saw a murder yesterday
Now your account ain't what it used to be
​According to them your eyes can't adjust to the violence you ain't used to seein
​Police brutality is all in your mind
And the tactics that they use only look worse in rewind
And people die everyday, you should get used to it
Hands behind yo' back, face down, and still say you shootin'
Can't breathe!
Knee where your neck be like why you movin'?
​Kids in your car, headed home, like what you doin'?
Like why you chillin'? Fuck yo' feelin's!
Why you smilin' when I'm so serious?
​I hate patrollin your space, like why you livin'?
Stop asking questions! why you filmin'?
You look suspicious! I think you dealin'!
Step out the car! fit the description!
Someone I fear! I need to kill it!
​Blood on the curb, I need to spill it!
 Nother civilian, 'nother not guilty!
Nother T-shirt, 'nother rap lyric!
Nother life gone, I can't forgive it!
- ​Big K.R.I.T., 2016

Police/vigilantes are encouraged, empowered and armed and licensed to kill us. They have no composure, discernment, empathy, decency or humanity; and we always “fit the description”—especially since they can’t tell us apart and Black people are apparently always guilty—but we are expected to be submissive and docile just to be murdered and blamed still. They pull the “feared for my life” card from the white supremacist playbook after every ambush, every lynching, every “police involved incident.”

Illegitimate white fear and unprovoked white violence generate legitimate black terror. Still, objectively unreasonable fears asserted by cops/vigilantes are always deemed adequate justification for our executions while Black people’s objectively reasonable terror is mocked or not even noticed or named. The state encourages, sanctions and participates in our murders, gives us directives on how we should respond to this violence and punishes us when we supposedly “step out of line.” This, while the “law” criminalizes legitimate Black terror and invites contrived white supremacist “fears” to operate as justification for Black executions.

We fear their guns, tasers, batons, cruisers, rough rides, knees. 
We fear their immunity, impunity and insolence.
We fear our lives becoming marginally important only in the spectacle of our horrific deaths.
We fear this “incident” being caught on camera and also fear it not.
We fear their imagination which creates a version of ourselves we have never known.
We fear joining our ancestors who were stolen from their loved ones much too often and much too soon. 
We fear exploitation of our communities’ righteous rage and our families’ interminable grief.
We fear our parents, partners, siblings, children dying of broken hearts. 
We fear the conundrum they create:

We stay, we die.
We comply, we die.
We run, we die.
We fight, we die.
We breathe, we die.
We Black, we die.

Our loved ones’ survival depends entirely on the whim of people indoctrinated and empowered by a system and society steeped in violent anti-Blackness—and our skin is Black. Our breath depends not on what we do or say, or whether we “comply” even. 

Generations of unrepentant racial violence, deprivation and terror. 400 years and we still cannot freely exist, move or breathe. How many generations of “the talk” before the world accepts that white supremacist terror and its attendant systems have sufficiently terrorized us?

Some things are so violent that they trigger physiological responses for Black people who have experienced, learned of, or witnessed their terror. Police are chief among these for many Black people in this era. Because of their past and present terror, their mere presence and existence is a form of violence. A few other examples:

• ships that stole and trafficked Black peoples  
• auction blocks for Black humans
• white mobs
• nooses
• whips and whipping posts
• confederate flags and monuments
• burning crosses  
• plantations, prisons, asylums
• shackles, handcuffs, restraint beds and chairs

Each of these affects some Black people in ways that they do not affect others based on myriad factors. When encountering these violent systems/symbols, some experience mind fogs and are unable to process information or move, while others’ bodies disconnect from our minds making the lifelong lessons from our elders feel like a far off fairy tale. Some become even more hyper vigilant and do not do anything more or less than they perceive they are being asked while others engage in nervous banter. Others spring into action to fight to the death for life. For others still, before we can do anything about it, our legs have carried our body one place while our mind is still with the police.

Whatever our response, the immediate anxious awareness of danger that Black people feel during interactions with “law enforcement” is perfectly reasonable regardless of the officers’ behavior with whom we are interacting.

Our responses are an amalgamation of over 400 years of memories, stories, postcards and videos of terror. But when cloaked in Black skin, the most common/human fear, stress, anxiety and trauma responses seem only to engender execution even when they are wholly rational. White supremacy continues its long and violent tradition of dispossession—stealing not only our lives and ability to live freely, but also stealing the history, trauma, feelings and disabilities that abused and traumatized Black people should be able to use to explain our [e]motions.

​HISTORY. ERASURE.

Oppression makes a wise man mad. . . . What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim . . . 
- Frederick Douglass, 1852

White supremacy removes the context of the conditions in which we live and survive while hyper contextualizing—often dramatizing—experiences of white power holders. To add insult to our injuries, this white supremacist hyper-contextualization/dramaturgy often occurs by theft of the legitimate emotions of maimed and murdered Black/Indigenous peoples. Those legitimate emotions are denied or stolen by power holders to then be used to justify the murder of marginalized people. They “feared for their lives” but they had the nooses, hounds, horses, trucks, guns, tanks and power.

The united states has a sordid and storied history of criminalizing and deeming “insane” Black people’s natural and rational responses to the violence and terror wrought upon us by its power holders—white colonial imperialists with a particular penchant for unspeakable violence. Black self defense and resistance to white supremacist terror has been and continues to be labeled “violence,” “crime” and “insanity,” among other made up things. Here are some examples:

• Black man asks cops why they are always harassing him and is told “it’s all in his head” moments before they brutally beat and tase him; 
• Black mother calls police for help after having a gun pointed at her and her child and is told “to calm down,” violently arrested and threatened with the Baker Act so she can “be corrected”; 
• officer murders a Black hard of hearing and low vision man whose car stalled and who was calmly walking with his hands up per her instructions and she claims that she shot him because she was “temporarily deaf” and “feared for her life”;
• police and prosecutors invoking irrelevant mental health records to describe a Black man who was stalked, ambushed and lynched by an armed white mob while out jogging as “aggressive” and having “initiated the fight” for trying to wrestle the shotgun used to murder him away from the mob while describing the mob as “properly and legally defending themselves.” 

Erasure of the genesis of trauma responses and disabilities in Black minds, bodies, and communities perpetuate inequities and exacerbate and justify violence as seen in the examples above. Pointed critiques of white supremacy never surface. Instead Black people are gaslit and our rational responses to white supremacist terror are criminalized and pathologized.

Black people’s insatiable longings for life and freedom have always been problematized, diagnosed, shamed, criminalized and brutally punished. Meanwhile, the cyclical and diabolical white supremacist violence we endure has not only been normalized, but has been hailed for “our benefit” and monetized—see enslavement, lynchings, black codes, jim crow, eugenics, human experimentation and zoos, institutionalization, incarceration, labor exploitation, and so on, and so forth. 

White supremacy has gained and maintained its foothold by and through enacting violence then strategically classifying exploited and harmed people into categories of deviant/delinquent, defective/disabled, and dependent. White supremacist systems maintain economic, political, social power by pitting exploited groups against one another and by convincing the public that each exploited group is deserving of continued violence because they belong to these constructed categories. 

Consider the following examples and note that the treatment/cure/punishment for each of these is yet more violence not a remedying of material conditions that would make the actions taken by Black people to love, find, free and protect our own unnecessary:
​

• Black enslaved people thinking and dreaming of freedom and longing to escape enslavement: “drapetomania”
• Black enslaved people protesting enslavement through work stoppages, destruction of crops and other “property,” etc; freed/never-enslaved Black people living their lives normally: “dysaesthesia aethiopica” (also known as “rascality”)

• Newly freed formerly enslaved Black people traveling in search of stolen loved ones and paid work opportunities: “vagrancy,” “loitering,” “soliciting”
• Black people taking to the streets to call attention to perpetual state violence against Black people: “rioting,” “disorderly conduct”
• Resisting police violence, arrest, restraint and seclusion, unwanted touch: “excited delirium,” “agitated delirium”
• Letting violent cops know that dislocating your shoulder and kneeing your back is not necessary while they also are smashing your face against the pavement: “resisting arrest” 

• Running away from violent, murderous cops with tasers and guns drawn and at the ready: also “resisting arrest”

• helping another person stay safe from police violence: “obstructing a government official” or even, “felony lynching”
• Using social media to object to unjust prosecutions of protestors: “lack of respect for orders of the judicial court and misplaced mistrust of police”

​The united states government has always used ideas about disability, delinquency and dependency, intertwined with constructed ideas about race to classify, criminalize, cage and disappear its “undesirables.” While the disability labels society attaches to Black people often are constructed or inaccurate, Black people do have disabilities in our minds, bodies and communities that have gone unnamed, uncounted, and unsupported for generations. This must change.

DISABILITY

“All my life I been sick and tired. Now I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired. . . . there's so much hypocrisy in this society and if we want America to be a free society we have to stop telling lies, that's all. Because we're not free and you know we're not free. . . . And you can always hear this long sob story: ‘You know it takes time.’ For three hundred years, we've given them time. . . and we want a change. . . . But this is something we going to have to learn to do and quit saying that we are free in America when I know we are not free. You are not free in Harlem. The people are not free in Chicago, because I've been there, too. They are not free in Philadelphia, because I've been there, too. And when you get it over with all the way around, some of the places is a Mississippi in disguise. And we want a change. . . . ”
- ​Fannie Lou Hamer, 1964