On Murderers and Babysitters (Part One)

As I near my 70th birthday I have been asking myself why I spend so much of my remaining time in life consulting for the defense of gang members who are charged with murder. While some may be innocent, most are guilty.  How can I justify this?

For many of the lawyers I work with defending gang members means upholding civil liberties and giving their client the best defense they can offer.  I’m not a lawyer and many cases boil down to technical disagreements and narrow applications of the law more than issues of justice. 

On the one hand, ethically, I do not believe people who kill should get away with it.  I feel empathy for offender and victim.  On the other hand I think our sentencing policy is draconian.  Incredibly, one in every five African Americans in prison today are serving life sentences and two thirds of all inmates serving life are minorities.   Human beings, even those who kill, are still human beings and I do not think they should be caged like wild animals for their natural life.  

During sentencing I try to explain gang involvement in such a way that a judge can have a bit more understanding, if not compassion.  A gang member’s life should not be reduced to a snapshot of a crime scene, but considered as one frame in a life long movie of change and maturation. I believe everyone deserves a chance at rehabilitation.

I’ve been immersed for two decades in the literatures on how we think in stereotypes,  but I began my court work not through books but experience. What directly pulled me into this field was getting to know gang members who killed and learning how their trials were conducted.  Let me introduce you to Ike Easley.

Ike Easley's current IDOC photo

Ike was one of the first expert witness cases I took and I’m afraid explaining his importance will take three blogs over the next three days.  The issue with Ike was not whether he killed: he committed not one, but two homicides. Let me walk you through his case from its beginning to the commuting of his death penalty sentence by then Gov. Ryan of Illinois. 

Ike was a severely abused child who was bullied at school. When his sister was being repeatedly struck by her boyfriend and threatened his mother,  Ike intervened. When the the abuser went for a gun, Ike shot him first.  Wolfgang calls this victim-precipitated homicide and this kind of murder is quite common. Ike reasonably argued it was self defense. He had no criminal record and was taken by utter surprise by a guilty verdict and a sentence of 20 years in prison.  Cook County Jail was also a shock, and Ike’s membership in the then Black Gangster Disciples was both a protective factor and an emotional response to what he saw as an unjust sentence.

Ike’s second killing got headlines and a high profile trial. Ike stabbed and killed Robert Taylor,  the Assistant Superintendent of Pontiac Correctional Center.   Taylor was a widely admired African American administrator and his murder sparked outrage among prison officials and prosecutors.   Ike’s trial resulted in a guilty verdict and the death penalty.  I got involved with the case through Ike’s appellate lawyer, Aviva Futorian, on a habeas petition of ineffective counsel in his original trial.  

I traveled to Menard where Ike was incarcerated and awaiting an execution date. I did not know what to expect in meeting this double murderer.  He had been transferred from Tamms, Illinois’ super max prison that was recently closed.  He was singled out in media accounts as among the “worst of the worst.”  This didn’t fit with the man I met.   I found Ike to be a gentle giant, soft spoken and an astute cultural critic. He was keenly aware of the culture of violence  promoted on TV and on the streets where he grew up. He admitted he experienced the effects of this culture personally and felt an obligation to warn youth of its dangers. In my statement to the court I compared him to troubled white kids I knew growing up in Clintonville, Wisconsin.

Magic to My Soul by Ike Easley

On my first visit we had an intense four hour conversation about what had happened on the day of his lethal assault on Taylor and exchanged personal experiences and outlooks.  Ike had never admitted to the murder and his vivid description of the incident to me was one of the most emotionally draining experiences of my life.  Ike is extremely emotional and his pent up rage contributed to both murder charges.  He also displayed a sensitive, artistic side and questioned me about my own children and life.  I'll explain the "babysitter" in the title in a later blog.  We connected on a human level in the first and subsequent meetings.

My conversations with Ike were the beginnings of my realization that gang members, like all of us, have multiple conflicting identities. While Ike had killed he also loved and at most times lived a life of peace. In prison he had often functioned as a peacemaker, breaking up fights.  For abused children like Ike who have faced unjust, racist treatment throughout their life extreme events can trigger inner violence.  This is what happened at Pontiac in 1987 as Ike snapped.

The events surrounding the murder were much more complex than presented at the trial as a cold blooded gang-ordered “hit.”  Conditions at Pontiac were described by many observers as “out of control.” Gangs were at war within the prison and weapons and drugs were everywhere. The year after Ike’s conviction, 16 guards were indicted for drug trafficking at the prison, This confirmed Ike’s sober explanation to me of how prison corruption was related to the murder.

According to Ike, various persons and factions within the prison administration were maneuvering to get their share of drug profits by allying with the Vice Lords and El Rukns against the Black Gangster Disciples. One of Ike’s best friends, Billy Jones or “Zodiac” was killed by guards and Ike and others believed his killing was part of a power play by guards and their new gang allies to seize control of the drug trade.  The guards claimed Zodiac swallowed a bag of cocaine and “accidentally” died but Ike told me he saw the assault on his best friend and became enraged.  Soon after Zodiac’s death Ike entered Taylor’s office with a “shank” and stabbed him to death. Tragically, there is no evidence Taylor was corrupt but only an available target for Ike’s out of control rage. 

While Ike’s history of abuse may be mitigating, his crime is surely deplorable. It is easy to see why any prosecutor or jury would be outraged. “Outrage” also isn’t a bad word to describe his trial as well.  In the next blog let me describe Ike’s trial in Joliet IL which to me is symbolically adjacent to Salem, MA.

Wolfgang, Martin E. 1957. "Victim Precipitated Criminal Homicide." The Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and  Police Science 48(1):1-11.

Gangland and the Untold History of the Vice Lords

          The CVL's "Teen Town" a 1960s "drop in" center for Lawndale's youth

Watching Gangland is always a trip down Sensationalism Lane. But "The Holy City," its "documentary" on the Vice Lords, is a particularly maddening experience. Captured (but unattributed) in its hour long feature is footage from "Lord Thing" (click to watch) directed by DeWitt Beall in collaboration with the Conservative Vice Lords and funded by the Xerox Company.  Lord Thing won the Silver Prize in 1970 at the Venice Film Festival and was screened at Cannes, but was ignored and buried in the US.  It tells a story that is diametrically opposed to Gangland's images of guns and scary stories.  Both videos, however,  raise important questions of how to report on gang history.

The two videos document the social activism of the CVL at the end of the 1960s and both let us hear the words of Bobby Gore, the CVL spokesman, explaining how the CVL transformed from a gang to a pro-community organization.  Lord Thing ends with the arrest of Gore and repression of the black liberation movement.  Holy City sees the Vice Lords of the 60s as more scam than real and uses police testimony to question the motivation of Gore and his colleagues.

What happened in the 1960s? The black liberation movement caused a crisis in the identity of gang members in Chicago. While the Vice Lords were expanding and becoming the first of Chicago's multi-neighborhood "super-gangs" they also were deeply effected by the civil rights and black liberation movement of the times. As in the movie on the LA's Crips and Bloods,  the Vice Lords and other black Chicago street gangs were not exempt from the rising political and racial consciousness of African Americans.

The Vice Lords "went conservative" and built businesses, received foundation funding, and even organized an open house for police!  While in 1968 homicide began to skyrocket in black Chicago neighborhoods, in Lawndale it dropped by nearly a third. But the Vice Lords were seen as a threat by the Democratic machine.  It was not the assassination of Dr. King that ended the CVL's programs, as Gangland asserts,  but the 1969 "war on gangs" of Mayor Ricard J. Daley.   Gang leaders were arrested across Chicago including Bobby Gore on a questionable murder charge.  Two weeks after Gore's arrest,  Daley's States Attorney Edward Hanrahan led the police raid that took the life of Fred Hampton of the Black Panthers. CVL programs were de-funded and the heroic efforts of the men and women of the CVL ended in "shattered dreams." (For my own more complicating view in a video documentary, click here).

But to hear Gangland tell the "Holy City" story, the Vice Lords of the 1960s were really about stealing money to buy guns and continue on a crime spree. Their social programs were a hoax.   While the Holy City allows Bobby Gore and Bennie Lee to speak, their arguments are quickly rebutted by "authoritative" police spokesmen.  The Vice Lords, we are told,  are now and always were  a "vicious gang" made up of "career criminals."  The Holy City's message is that despite an "appearance" of doing good, the Vice Lords are really one thing:  bad.

Lord Thing is a corrective to this tale of evil.  But the notion that the Vice Lords were proto-revolutionary organizations (one Lord Thing scene shows demonstrators chanting "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh") is also misleading. The Vice Lords were and are a street gang, one immersed in the life of survival on the streets and masculine contests of violence. While the CVL created a wonderful "Art and Soul" art studio alongside numerous commercial and cultural ventures,  gang violence and criminal activities never ceased. While homicide dropped in 1968, it was still much higher than in most Chicago neighborhoods and rose again in 1969 to among the highest rates in the city.

Chicago's Hull House has begun an important "CVL Traveling History Museum" to memorialize the heroic efforts of Gore and other CVL leaders to transform their gang. They remind us as well that the Vice Lords were made up of men and women who accomplished some amazing things. Their intention is to teach Chicago, and particular African American youth, that the life of the streets does not have to mean drugs and violence. There is another way and the CVL of the 1960s is a prime example.  Youth can take a path of social activism, not gang-banging.

The lesson to be taught about gang members however, is not that they are either good or evil, but like all of us, have both in their nature. The reality of the streets in Chicago is that survival means illegal ventures alongside licit employment. Gangs mean hyper-masculine "them vs us" violence, but they are also mass organizations of the streets that can potentially mobilize the "underclass" for social change.  Gangs can be seen as an arena for the struggle over identity, and projects like Hull House can challenge youth to decide whether their rebellion will lead them to become a gangster or a social activist?

We are captivated by simple narratives of heroes and villains,  where good and evil are depicted in unambiguous fashion.  Videos like Gangland's Holy City can be understood as "frames," a lens by which we prioritize some information and exclude or minimize others.  When a powerful frame like the Holy City is created, it can only be contested by first presenting "discrepant information" to challenge what is left out or distorted.  "Discrepant" means providing information that does not fit with a frame, in this case the frame of gangs as completely bad.  I see Lord Thing and the exhibit by Hull House as "discrepant information" to Gangland's, law enforcement's, and the mass media frame of gangs as evil..

But once this frame is questioned, we need to put a more complete counter-frame in place in order to win the public away from support for repression.  This has been my work over the past three decades. I am trying to use all the means at my disposal  — including this blog — to argue gangs are not simple examples of good or evil,  but made up of human beings who like all of us are trying to figure out how to survive and thrive, even if they often go about this destructively.  They are organizations of what are called the "socially excluded" and we need to realize that today gang members number in the tens of millions worldwide. We cannot simply jail or kill our way out of our gang problem. Gangs aren't going away no matter what we do.

This means we need to understand the multiple conflicting identities of gang members and struggle to promote what is positive and pro-social and work to isolate the very real tendencies toward violence and organized crime.  We need to oppose the simplistic answer of mass incarceration.  The discrepant information of Lord Thing and Hull House's exhibit help us challenge the dominant frame that supports one-sided policies of "war" on gangs.   But they take only the first steps toward a counter-frame of inclusive democracy.  Today's social movements, like Occupy Wall Street,  need to make more efforts to include what the French called sans culottes, the ill-clad warriors of the street, or they will surely fall short of their goals.

My role these past years has been trying to figure out how best to use "discrepant information" to construct a convincing counter-frame on gangs. It is a work in progress.