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A L S O+T O D A Y
T A B L E+T A L K Should a lawyer defend a client whose guilt is known? Weigh the evidence in the Social Issues area of Table Talk
R E C E N T L Y What did the president touch, and when did he touch it? The last plantation Peace with honor?
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RIVERSIDE, CALIF. -- Downtown is sleepy this gray morning. It's a national holiday and the courthouse is still, the streets nearly deserted. Then a throng of marchers rounds a bend, approaching City Hall Plaza from 14th Street. Hundreds of people, old and young, black, white and brown, swarm the sidewalk, walking and talking in pairs and in clusters. From a distance, it looks like a scene that Martin Luther King Jr., whose birthday is being celebrated today, would smile upon. As the train of bodies comes closer, the signs come into focus -- "Stop the Killing Now," "Innocent teen murdered in cold blood," "A call for 911 ends in death" -- and so does the anger. Riverside leaders like to boast of their city's racial harmony -- Riverside was an arrival point for black Los Angeles residents who began fleeing that city after the Watts riots in the 1960s, the first city in the country to voluntarily integrate its schools, the first to name a high school after King. But to the chanting marchers, none of that history seems to matter. Not since the early morning hours of Dec. 28, when a 19-year-old black woman named Tyisha Miller was riddled with bullets by four police officers as she sat in her aunt's car at a gas station on a well-traveled intersection. Coming on top of several other recent racially charged incidents, the case has left this predominantly working-class city of 250,000 one hour east of Los Angeles stunned and enraged. Three weeks after King's birthday, the protests continue. Now national leaders are getting involved: On Feb. 16, the Rev. Jesse Jackson is scheduled to speak at a vigil commemorating Miller's killing. What exactly happened that night? So far, key facts remain fuzzy. Until they were subpoenaed by a county grand jury last week, friends of Miller's who reportedly witnessed the killing refused to talk to the police or the press (although they have talked to lawyers, who have passed on some of their accounts to the media). Their testimony before the grand jury is secret. With so little information and such strong emotions, speculation and suspicion abound. But many in Riverside's black community feel they already know enough to conclude that the killing was just another example of what they see as the police racism that lies beneath the surface of what the National Civic League dubbed this "All-American City." "We don't need a police department that is an assassin squad," bellows the Rev. Bernell Butler, a tall, handsome man in his 30s. From a stage set up in City Hall Plaza, Butler's piercing voice is so powerful he doesn't use a megaphone. He and his brother DeWayne, cousins of Tyisha Miller, have been acting as Miller family spokesmen, expressing their rage and calling for justice at small local rallies and on national talk shows like "Leeza." "They didn't give her any benefit of the doubt," Butler says. "They didn't ask any questions." The police and others are asking plenty of questions now, in the wake of Miller's death and the protest it has spawned. Why was she waiting at the gas station? Why did she have a gun? Could the police have handled their approach differently? What provoked them to shoot her? Why didn't her friends who saw the killing come forward voluntarily? Above all, of course, the question lingers: What role did race play in her death? Or, to ask that question a different way: If she were white, would Tyisha Miller be alive today? N E X T+P A G E+| "She was being naughty" |
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