Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson has stuck with me since it was assigned as last year’s summer reading. I agonize over the fact that our criminal justice system is not broken; it works exactly as it is supposed to.
In the back of my mind, I hear Anthony Ray Hinton’s speech to the Fieldston community. When he called upon myself and my peers to use our education, our youth, and our passion to defend poor, wrongly incarcerated persons, I heard him.
My father is an ethics, law, and philosophy professor. Since I was a toddler, my parents instilled in me a strong sense of justice. They often remind me that the law is not always just.
For centuries this country has witnessed in horror and anger the horrific police brutality, the lack of accountability and punishment of police officers, and the racism of the courts. The past few years have been especially notable in terms of the Black Lives Matter Movement and the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.
In July, I participated in the Manhattan District Attorney’s (DA) Office’s High School Internship program. In my application I wrote, “I believe that the law must be just and that, as Gandhi taught us, an unjust law is itself a species of violence.”
The internship was a four-week virtual program. Every day interns participated in multiple discussions and presentations with the heads of different units within the DA’s office, such as the chief of The Police Accountability Unit Nick Voirst, the head of The Special Victims Unit Joyce Smith, and more.
All interns were assigned a mentor within the office. I was paired with Assistant District Attorney (ADA) Miya Saint-Louis. I absolutely loved working with her. I suffered a moral dilemma throughout the program and was comforted that she shared the same one.
When I think of reforming criminal justice, my mind goes to organizations such as Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative, not the district attorney. Not the very institution that created these injustices. I was torn. I understood that I cannot fix an institution from the outside looking in. If I really wanted to create change, I had to do it from within the very institution that I despise.
After the first week we were assigned a policy project for which we would act as policy analysts for the office. We were instructed to pick a policy, pattern, or issue that we were passionate about that we believed the DA needed to improve. A one-page policy memo was due the final day and we prepared presentations for the executive attorneys of the office.
Immediately I knew that I wanted to combat the shameful way that victims of sexual assault are treated by the criminal justice system.
I had to keep in mind that the DA’s office has no jurisdiction over the police and that my policy proposal had to be feasible; thus, proposals to pass legislation should be avoided.
There are infinite problems with how the criminal justice system treats victims of sex crimes. The process of reporting a crime is a traumatic event itself, as is testifying. I realized that what I needed to target were the rape myths, victim blaming, and expectations that society places on victims.
Jurors do not understand that the neurobiology of a victim changes during a traumatic event. The traumatic event of being sexually assaulted impacts the credibility of the victim’s testimony, which ultimately impacts the verdict of the case. Because the victim’s brain function changed and the jurors do not know that it did, it gives the victim an outrageous disadvantage.
In my research I found that trauma impacts focus, memory encoding, the hippocampus, habit/reflex responses which include dissociation, tonic immobility, collapsed mobility, and habitual ways to deal with aggressive personas.
In my proposal I wrote that “The National Judicial Education Program reports that 59% of jurors believe a victim should try everything to fight the assault. Jurors that are unaware that habit and reflex responses can cause a victim to freeze and not resist their attacker, may believe the act was consensual. If jurors are uninformed that the hippocampus jumps between central and peripheral details, they may question why the victim does not recall crucial details of the assault. Lastly, if jurors are uneducated on the difference between minimal and super memory encoding, they may misinterpret a victim’s fragmented memories as selective and untruthful.”
To combat jurors lack of knowledge I knew that expert testimony on the neurobiology of trauma needed to become the standard in Manhattan sexual assault trials. New York States uses the Frye standard to determine whether expert testimony is admissible.
I recommended that the office, specifically the Sex Crimes Unit and Special Victims Bureau, should filed a series of motions requesting a Frye hearing in sexual assault cases in which the victim’s testimony is crucial to the case, but their neurobiology was severely impacted.
A Frye hearing determines whether the method the expert witness used to collect evidence is generally accepted within their scientific field. To reach the standard, I recommended that the office present an expert with a variety of sources to support their testimony.
A series of Frye hearings are necessary before a court can rely on previous rulings to rule the expert testimony on the neurobiology of trauma as admissible in every case. Unfortunately, there is not a specific number of Frye hearings needed for courts to take judicial notice of past hearings, so the office should persevere until a court does.
In my conclusion, I recommended that the expert testify immediately before the victim so that the jury has the relevant scientific information needed to understand the victim’s testimony. This order will help eliminate preconceived, uninformed, biases against victims of sexual assault.
The internship had one in person day. I spent seven hours in the Manhattan courts meeting lawyers, judges, and shadowing my mentor. ADA Saint-Louis was in arraignments all day and I got to stand beside her as they were presented. The few hours I spent in arraignments were emotionally tolling.
I was watching as people were told their charges, whether they were eligible for bail, and I wanted to sprint out of the courtroom. I was witnessing people’s lives get taken away from them. I listened as a drug addict was given the opportunity to return to rehab instead of jail; I watched as my mentor and the defense attorney argued over a man who fired a firearm; and I was not sure which side of the courtroom I wanted to stand on. The defense? Or the DA? I wasn’t sure I wanted to be in the courtroom at all. I wanted to fix the justice system, not witness it ruin people.
I am very grateful for all that I learned during this internship. It was incredibly insightful, and I left it with a much better understanding of the criminal justice system. Although, I can’t say that I left it with certainty that I want to be an ADA or a defense attorney, or even a lawyer at all.
