An unjust burden: Black man held in US jail for decade without trial

A black man has been held in US jail without a trial and without representation for 10 years after being charged in connection with a double murder in Georgia, once more revealing the failure of US so-called justice especially towards people of color.

Maurice Jimmerson, now 32, and four others were arrested by police in 2013 for murder. A jury acquitted two of them, but for a decade, Jimmerson has spent the majority of that time in county jail, legally innocent.

Several factors such as the COVID-19 pandemic, a 2021 courthouse flood, and the decision by the previous judge to try Jimmerson and his codefendants separately caused the delay, according to Gregory Edwards, the local district attorney talking to Atlanta News First (ANF), a local news station.

Jimmerson has been left without an attorney for the past eight months due to particularly bureaucratic errors.

“The county has been unable to find a public defender for Jimmerson, which has lengthened his time behind bars,” Edwards added.

According to ANF, Jimmerson's old attorney, Benjamin Harrell, filed requests in July and August of last year to be released from the case. But the court employees lost Harrell's request so he was technically listed as Jimmerson's attorney until April 12 of this year.

Though Jimmerson never received actual legal help from Harrell during this time, the Georgia Public Defender Council insists that Jimmerson has had access to legal counsel during the past eight months, despite the error.

ANF notes that Georgia's public defender system is plagued with issues, primarily understaffing and difficulty retaining attorneys. One judge insists that they lack public defenders for the work to be done, but on the other side the director of the Georgia Public Defender Council disputes this, saying, “We have more employees than we've ever had in the history of the agency.”

Regardless of the source of the issues, it is indicated that when the bureaucracies go unchecked, defendants like Jimmerson—who cannot afford their own lawyers and must rely on public defenders—are in danger of being effectively denied their Sixth Amendment right to a speedy trial.

The Sixth Amendment of the US Constitution guarantees people accused of crimes the right to a speedy trial and access to an attorney if they cannot afford one.

“For so many of the people that I’ve met with in jails, who have been in there for months and sometimes years, I’m the first attorney that they’ve seen,” said Maya Chaudhuri, an attorney with the Southern Center for Human Rights, an Atlanta-based civil rights organization.

Over the past few months, Chaudhuri said she’s traveled across the state tracking down people in jail charged with crimes who do not have court-appointed attorneys and Jimmerson is one of them.

Human rights vs. inhumane conditions in US jails

The US, a country that claims to be championing human rights, jails more people per capita than any other nation.

The police violence has assumed alarming proportions in the US in recent years, with people of color being the main targets. In line with its commitments under international law, the Biden administration must prioritize addressing this urgent human rights crisis.

In the United States, people of African descent and other people of color are subjected to police brutality that terrorizes ordinary civilians and, if imprisoned, are more likely to experience prison conditions that may amount to torture.

A 2021 study in the medical journal The Lancet recorded 30,800 deaths from police violence across the country between 1980 and 2018, far higher than estimates offered by the US National Vital Statistics System.

Recent studies also show that Nearly 50,000 people are held in prolonged solitary confinement in US prisons. In some cities, the majority of people in solitary confinement are people of color.

It said more than 55 deaths of deaths from police violence in the US from 1980 to 2018 were misclassified or unreported in official vital statistics reports.

Moreover, according to new data released earlier this month, US police killed at least 1,176 people in 2022, making it the deadliest year on record for police violence in the country since experts first started tracking the killings.

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