McMickle Blasts Justice System; Grand Jury Process ‘had an Apartheid Feel,’ NAACP Ex-Leader Says
Cleveland Plain Dealer
Mark Naymik, Plain Dealer Politics Writer
After completing a four-month term on a Cuyahoga County grand jury, one of Cleveland’s top black leaders has likened the criminal justice system to apartheid.
The Rev. Marvin McMickle complained in a recent letter to a judge of “largely white enforcement officers bringing evidence to largely white grand jury panels to issue indictments of largely African-American and Hispanic defendants.”
The process, he wrote, “had an apartheid feel to it.”
McMickle, pastor of Antioch Baptist Church in Cleveland, headed one of four grand juries that served September through December.
He sent the letter last week to Richard McMonagle, presiding Common Pleas judge.
“My hope is that at some level, people will start talking about these issues,” McMickle said in an interview yesterday.
Grand jury foremen typically write reports about their experiences to the judges. McMickle, a former congressional candidate and former chairman of the local NAACP, released his letter to the media yesterday.
McMonagle said he disagrees with many of McMickle’s points but is willing to discuss them.“It’s unfortunate, if he were trying to make a statement,” McMonagle said. “We are not here to make social statements. We are supposed to determine if a crime was committed.”
Grand juries, based on evidence presented by the county prosecutor, determine whether to indict someone on a felony charge.
In his letter, McMickle complained that he saw only one black prosecutor present information before the grand jury. He said the office needs to “examine its ranks” to ensure it has a “good representation of African-American attorneys.”Of the county’s 205 prosecutors, 34, or 17 percent, are black, according to Prosecutor William D. Mason’s office. An additional 26 prosecutors are Hispanic or members of other ethnic groups, including Arab and Jewish.
Mason said the number of black prosecutors is equal to the number who worked under his predecessor, Stephanie Tubbs Jones.
McMickle also said the prosecutor’s office appeared to be too eager to indict people on petty drug offenses, clogging up court dockets. He also criticized “random stops by police for alleged questioning on traffic violations” that result in the discovery of “some infinitesimal amount of drugs, and a quick arrest.”“I felt like I was participating in a process that was designed to quickly indict and send off to trial as many people as possible, with the most of them being black,” he wrote.
And he argued that drug addicts need more than to be thrown in jail, saying the way to win the war on drugs is to shift the focus to “interdiction, treatment and education.”
McMonagle agreed that there should be fewer drug cases in the system. He said a study conducted last fall showed that 73 percent of felony cases in the county are related to drugs.
“We wish [the prosecutor's office] would reduce some of them to misdemeanors to lighten our load,” he said.
But he denied that blacks are being targeted, saying that crime is “related to the social and economic aspects of life” in Cleveland, where a greater proportion of minorities live in poverty than whites.
“Minorities are committing more crimes,” he said.Last year, the prosecutor’s office issued 19,000 indictments and tried 540 felony cases.
“I make no excuses for presenting crimes that meet standards of probable cause,” Mason said.