Lee Merritt is an American civil rights lawyer and activist, most known for his work on racial justice issues. He’s represented clients in high profile, national wrongful death cases like Botham Jean the young Black accountant who was gunned down by an off duty cop while eating ice cream on his couch, and Ahmaud Arbery whow as chased and gunned down by two white men on the streets of Georgia. Merritt sat down with Striped to talk about his career, his cases, and insights into civil rights.
How often do you get wrongful death cases?
These things happen quite a bit, about 3 people a day are shot by police. It’s more destructive than it appears. Most of the calls we can pick out the cases that are the most offensive. Some of them fall outside of the immunities like qualified immunity. The law is good and people are wicked. The system itself is run by white supremacists. Our system of government, executive, judicial and legislative the men and women governing those branches have failed to enforce the constitution in a way to ensure the protection of black citizens, in 400 years they’ve adjusted towards justice but they have failed to meet that mark. You could call us all equal now but you all created poverty, overincarceration and lack of terms of access exclusively designed for this community. Its one thing to remove color signs and another thing to purify the water.
You represented Jordan Edwards, a teenager who was gunned down by a cop at a high school party Was that racially motivated?
At the trial it was revealed that the cop who killed him, Roy Oliver, was a member of a white supremacist gang from teenage years. Culture in policing attracts white supremacists like Roy Oliver. The cops were picking on the kids at the party too, it was an opportunity to harass the other kids. It was the cleanest party I’ve ever seen it was boring, no drugs no alcohol it was good clean fun. It’s the culture, the militarized culture of policing that north Texas fosters. They operate like a gang. It’s a dominate model. It leads to a lot of innocent bloodshed. Even cartels are part of the prison industrial complex.
We believe in swat militarized unit. The need for that is a fear-based culture that doesn’t make sense to many nations. We do want safety and public servants who can monitor the progress of cities. That’s not the policing model we get. Its dominated the entire region and go find the criminals which is imputing criminality on whatever training conditioning crime looks like.
How many times has racism affected you directly?
I don’t know where to start, wow so many time. I was the first one in my family to graduate high school and attend college. When I went to Atlanta I registered to vote, I wasn’t sure about my citizenship. I told the judge I couldn’t do my jury duty any longer, and the judge sent police to my college and sent me to jail for a weekend. The judge was Black. But it just goes to show how we’re all affected by institutional racism. And we allow that for exclusively Black populations. Or at a predominantly white population. When I was a good black kid among white folks my good white friends would come to me and say to me “you know Stacy youre not like other black kids”
What is wrong with the law in America?
The law is good but the people are evil, we set up a society that could ideally work, but the evil the lie was human trafficking divesting people of their land, we’re going to slaughter them. “Make America great again” hold on when was it great? What period was that? I dont think America can heal and be what it aspires to be until it atones for it’s original sin.
How can America atone for its original sin? What is America’s original sin?
The original sin is how America doesn’t acknowledge the people they killed and oppressed to establish the nation, like Black people, and Native Americans. Attonement isn’t looking back and saying “look, were sorry for what happened 400 years ago” its saying the systems that now exist to maintain its oppression have to be destroyed. Its why I’m confused when even conservatives balk at the idea of defunding the police. That’s probably the least radical war cry I’ve ever heard. People are being killed and oppressed by the police. We’re not saying kill the police or abolish the police.
Our government has marginalized black voices like Larry Hoover gang leader in Chicago whos in isolation in a prison because we don’t allow for true Black voices, even the filtered black voices that we do receive they’re stigmatized as radical. Black lives matter was stigmatized as radical. Instead of censoring the messenger pays attention to the message. What the black community has been trying to say to America is that we are being targeted and harassed and we don’t have the option of being at peace. Our government literally has a policy called war on drugs that has led to the largest prison communities in human history. This has been accelerated in the past three decades, its a war on drugs thats effectively been a war on Black communities. There’s money for the war, soldiers for the war who are particularly invested in Black communities, of whom they fill these cages with.
Is the war on Black people happening now?
Yes, it was a culture that was never dealt with, I represented 44 families in the last 4 years and I only take about 10% of the cases I hear about. The war on Black people never went away. It’s accelerated for the black community. In the last 20 years the incarceration rate for women went up 900%. It’s destroying communities because when a mother is taken from a community its an explosion. The household is gone, the family unit is severed, child care is gone, the community is irreprably harmed when you start taking mothers.
Biden apologized for the war, but he’s in office and he still hasn’t ended it. The 1994 crime bill he helped write was terrible and its still on the books. The BYRNE grant provided cops with militarized weapons, and Biden supported it. Problem is its still that bad today. I go to a funeral every week. It’s an urgent problem, it’s an ongoing genocide. I’ve called it a genocide at a congressional hearing in a room full of experts and nobody disagreed with me. It qualifies as an actual genocide.
What do you think about Trump’s First Step Act that released hundreds of federal prisoners?
Trump’s blip in terms of reduction of inmates will ultimately be seen as going in the opposite direction of Obama. He opened a backdoor slightly and allowed a few prisoners out but flung open the front gates to let people in with his law and order mantra, he reinvigorated this war on crime and juiced it back up. He flooded the front door with new prisoners and trickled out a few out the back. Nobody has flung open the front doors, nobody has said “lets reduce the prison polutation by 50% in 5 years.”
Throw the front doors open I mean most people don’t belong there. My fathers in prison for possession of a $10 quantity of drugs. He’s a senior citizen who can die of covid-19. There are countless people like him. There are people that need to be relooked at. People are killed in prison all the time, they’re smothered they’re beaten, often arrested with no real evidence of guilt or held in pretrial. Mass incarceration was an Obama failure, a Trump failure, and its teeing up to be a Biden failure.
How do you respond to the conservative argument that Black neighborhood have higher crime rates so they need to be over policed?
Its such low hanging fruit, you have to be willfully ignorant of a few facts to accept that argument. Number one, the logic is flawed. The logic is black people are committing more crimes necessitating police encounters. The thing is, you can’t identify a crime unless you have an encounter. In order for a crime to be recorded, a police officer needs to show up. My father for example has a $10 quantity of drugs. Statistically it’s just as likely as fathers in suburban areas have $10 quantities of drugs too. The problem is that people in Black neighborhoods have more police encounters. Statistics say even when they arrest white folks, if they go before a judge they are 10 times as likely to walk. Our court data treats black skin different than white even when the crime is identical. According to data, the 1st correlating factor is race, the 2nd is money. If the defendant has access to a lot of money then he’s likely to afford proper legal services and walk. Justice is neither blind nor just. If you give me the color of their skin and the amount of money in their bank account I can give you a likelihood of whether or not they’ll go to jail. Again, this is according to data not opinion.
The idea is that police exist to keep property safe. There is no correlation looking at how that’s worked out for them, with the increase of police presence the value of property goes down and crime goes up. We had an interesting experiment over the summer. In Kentucky, 56 people were arrested in one day in the Attorney General Daniel Cameron’s neighborhood. So that drove down the value of the property so much, that Cameron had to move. The arrests bring problems they don’t resolve them.
You represented Botham Jean, the Black man who was gunned down in his apartment by an off duty cop, do you think it really was an “accident.”
I believe what Amber Guyger, the off duty cop who shot Botham, said. She lied and said he was coming at her. She was caught in that lie because the bullet caught a downward trajectory and lies deep in his back which means he had to be slanted. So that defense failed. However, she did say she was distracted, she was planning to have a booty call with her partner that night they had a long conversation in the parking lot. Those texts were deleted but it seems like he wasn’t going to show up that night. She was distracted, she walked down the corridor to the apartment, she was upset, she had a service pistol on her, she had her uniform on. She was still on duty operating according to her training. A police officer is a police officer all the time, jsut like I’m a lawyer all the time, and it drives my girlfriend crazy because if she says something like “for the record” I’m thinking “whose keeping the record”? So just like lawyers are trained to think like lawyers, police officers are trained to think like police officers. That’s what she was feeling when she approached the apartment. She was fully aware but possibly distracted because her booty call wasn’t going to work that night. She gets to the door to the apartment thinking it was hers, ignores the red matt, ignores the sign on the door, she smells weed, hears shuffling, and her criminal training kicks in. She puts her bag down and she was now investigating the crime. She enters the apartment and it was a Black man sitting on the couch eating ice cream smoking a joint. He said “HEY” and she got scared and started shooting. Two shots. One hit him, one didn’t. The reason was she said “let me see your hands” and he did not show his hands. That’s what shes trained that she can do, other officers testified it was perfectly reasonable given the facts and circumstances. They train cops to think “If I don’t see a black mans hands and I smell marijuana I can kill” I think she would’ve given him more time if he was white, it was salacious from the beginning. The only thing that made it reasonable was that we know that white cops are trained to fear black men.
You start with they’re giving warrior training.
Theres two models for policing, the guardian model and the sheepdog or warrior model. The warrior model says your job is to get home safe as you go in and fight this war on drugs. They call it war on drugs it’s really the war on black people. In the guardian model, they make sure the streets are safe. That happens in the white communities.
Are cops, generally, racist?
I think cops are just like everybody else but they work in a profession that has a basis and mission that is racist. Our government sets us on a mission. We have sent them on a mission to fight drugs. They could fight a lot of things, they could fight sex trafficking, but theres not a war on sex trafficking. Tupac suggested they could fight poverty. They only have guns mace and tasers, it would be great if they went out with money, those are the types of cops
What is your message to incarcerated individuals?
They need to make a lot more noise. They gatta get their families, communities, resources, and rally them. Some of our best and brightest are in prison and its their responsiblility to dismantle it from within.
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