by Robert Jensen
Department of Journalism
University of Texas
Austin, TX 78712
work: (512) 471-1990
rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu
copyright Robert William Jensen 1998
The Sun (Baltimore)
September 13, 1998, Sunday, FINAL EDITION
PERSPECTIVE, Pg. 1N
BY Robert William Jensen
HOW DEEPLY do the politics of race and class continue to haunt the U.S. criminal justice system? A Texas murder case gives us hints:
Lacresha Murray reads over the statement that two Austin, Texas, police detectives want her to sign concerning the death of 2-year-old Jayla Belton.
Lacresha hasn't seen her family in four days. She is alone, with no attorney, parent or guardian.
She is black. She is from a working-class neighborhood.She is 11 years old.
After consistently saying that she didn't hurt Jayla, Lacresha agrees with the detectives that she might have accidentally dropped andkicked the baby while taking her to get help. Then Lacresha struggles toread the statement they want her to sign. She stops at a word she doesn'tunderstand.
"What's that word? Home-a-seed?" she asks
The detective corrects her pronunciation: "Homicide."
"What's that?" Lacresha asks. The question goes unanswered. She continues to read. The detectives had told her that they were justtrying to help her and her family, that she could go home once things werestraightened out.
Lacresha signs the statement, but she doesn't go home.
Two years later, after a conviction based almost entirely on that statement - what one of Lacresha's attorneys has called an "extracted 'confession'" - Lacresha Murray has yet to go home. She is servinga 25-year sentence.
Police and prosecutors say they did their jobs in a tough case. Critics say Lacresha is a prisoner of the politics of race and class. But no matter what one thinks about Lacresha's guilt or innocence, serious questions about the fairness of her trials remain unanswered.
An appeals court might resolve some of the legal questions in the coming months. But whatever the outcome, one simple question hangs in the air:
Would the police have dared treat a middle- or upper-class white kid the way they treated Lacresha?
That question illustrates the complexity of the intersection of race and class, not only in the criminal justice system but in society more generally. No one suggests that ugly, KKK-style racism was at work.One of the detectives who interrogated Lacresha is Hispanic. The lead prosecutor is black. The district attorney is a Texas liberal who has a history ofemphasizing social, not just punitive, solutions to crime.
The district attorney says the case would not have beenhandled differently in any other part of town. But the organizer of a Lacreshasupport network argues that "if she had been blond, blue-eyed, in a pinafore,from west Austin [a white, affluent part of town], the police would havenever targeted her as a suspect."
In some respects, this case resembles the recent Chicagoinvestigation in which 7- and 8-year-old boys from a predominantly black,low-income community became the youngest children ever charged with murder.The charges were dropped weeks later when police discovered semen on theunderwear of the 11-year-old victim and concluded that an adult had tohave been involved.
Like the rush to judgment in Chicago, Lacresha's storytells us much about how privilege, or the lack of it, can affect justice,or the lack of it, in the United States.
Lacresha's story began on May 24, 1996, when Jayla Belton was left at the home of Lacresha's grandparents, who are also her adoptive parents and who often would baby-sit Jayla. The 2-year-old had been sickall day, throwing up several times and sleeping most of the day. Laterin the afternoon, Lacresha brought Jayla to her grandfather, who realizedthe seriousness of the child's condition and took her to the hospital.Shortly after their arrival, Jayla was dead.
After an autopsy the next day, the medical examiner ruled the cause of death to be a blow to the liver. Because of the medical examiner's guess about the time of the beating, police focused on the Murray homeand Lacresha.
Officials have claimed that the legal requirement thata magistrate grant permission for the questioning of a child didn't applybecause Lacresha was not technically in custody at the time detectivesinterviewed her. Yet Lacresha was read her rights (though it is not clearhow much she understood), and the interview tape suggests police were tryingto squeeze out a confession.
A week after Jayla's death, Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle charged Lacresha with capital murder, telling a news conference that the case showed "that Austin is not immune from the hideous maladysweeping the country of children killing other children."
Lacresha was too young to be charged as an adult; the minimum age for such a charge in Texas is 14. But Earle invoked a sentencing lawthat can result in a juvenile's being sent to adult prison at age 18 toserve the rest of a fixed sentence.
A guilty verdict
In August 1996, a jury returned a guilty verdict on charges of intentional injury to a child and criminally negligent homicide, andLacresha was sentenced to 20 years. Prosecutors acknowledged there wasno physical evidence or eyewitness testimony to implicate Lacresha. Thestate's case rested almost entirely on the statement and shaky circumstantialevidence. Her court-appointed attorney presented no evidence at the trial,believing that the state's case was so weak that the jury would have toacquit.
In October 1996, state District Judge John Dietz threwout the results of the trial over which he had presided, saying he didnot think justice had been done.
A second trial in February 1997 resulted in a convictionon the charge of injury to a child. Lacresha was given a 25-year sentence.Her conviction is on appeal to the state's 3rd Court of Appeals. [NOTE: The appeals court overturned the conviction in 1999, and in 2001 the district attorney's office requested dismissal of the charges to Dietz, who complied.]
Earle said the investigation of the case was more thanadequate and the prosecution was fair. But several holes and contradictionsremain in the case. Independent medical examiners and a psychologist haveoffered compelling rebuttals to prosecution claims in the case. The dropping-and-kicking scenario doesn't fit the severity of the injuries, and despite their efforts in the interrogation, the detectives never got Lacresha to "confess" tomore than that.
Also, there was no physical evidence at the Murray home,though the kind of beating Jayla endured likely would have left traces,such as blood. Indications that Jayla might have been beaten elsewhere,before being brought to the Murray home, were not aggressively investigated.Finally, the prosecution never established that Lacresha could have inflictedsuch a savage beating or had any reason to want to kill the child.
High-profile cases
At the time of Jayla's death, several high-profile murder cases with child defendants had captured the nation's attention. And forseveral years, the news had been full of stories about the alleged increasein violence by children, with some kids labeled "super predators." In suchan atmosphere, selling the public on the idea that an 11-year-old girl- especially from a poor side of town occupied largely by minorities -could commit such a brutal crime, even without evidence, proved amazinglyeasy.
Also at that time, Earle, the long-time Democratic district attorney, was facing an unusually tough election challenge by a Republican. Critics say Earle, who went on to win the race, cynically exploited theMurray case to paint himself as a candidate who was tough on crime. Earledenied that politics played any role and called the public concern aboutthe case "absolutely rabid, runaway goofy" based on a "huge amount of misinformation."
One of those critics, Barbara Taft, started a Lacreshasupport group, People of the Heart, that has made international connectionsthrough its web site (www.peopleoftheheart.org ).Taft, who has worked most of her life as a legal secretary, believes that it will take public pressure to get the legal system to do the right thing.
Even people who say they are unsure of Lacresha's guiltor innocence are disturbed by the way the case was handled by police andprosecutors.
Was race a factor?
So the question remains: Were Lacresha's race and classa factor in how police perceived the case and how prosecutors shaped thecase for the jury? My conclusion is, without question, yes.
Until a friend invited me to attend an informational meeting on the case this spring, I knew nothing more about Lacresha Murray than what I remembered from the local newspaper's coverage. But as I read more and more about the case, my doubts about the conviction deepened.
When I listened to the tape of the police interrogationof Lacresha, I was appalled at how she was bullied and manipulated. Taftdescribes the interrogation as "immoral, illegal and inadmissible." Afterreviewing the case, one of Murray's lawyers said the police used "the verybest Gestapo tactics" to extract a confession. My conclusion is that acase based on that statement is no case at all.
Like an increasing number of people in Austin, I couldno longer believe that Lacresha was responsible for Jayla's death nor defend the behavior of police and prosecutors. As a parent, I know that my child would never have to endure that kind of treatment because he would be protected by his being white and a member of a middle-class, professional family.It is difficult to review the facts of the case and not be sad, angry orboth.
Both girls are victims
The sadness and anger are not only over Lacresha's fate.As Taft reminds people, Jayla's death should also weigh on our consciences.Both girls, she said, were victims of child abuse - Jayla at the handsof an abuser who has gone unpunished, and Lacresha at the hands of thecriminal justice system.
"This is not just about racism and classism. We're a society in total denial about the extent of child abuse, and it's the silence ofthe community that allows that," said Taft, who was physically abused asa child.
"No one spoke for me when I was a child. No one spoke for Jayla when she was alive," Taft said. "That's why we have to speak forLacresha, because it's silence that kills."
Robert William Jensen is a professor in the Departmentof Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin.