Abolition Constitutionalism Contents
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
VOLUME 133 NOVEMBER 2019 NUMBER 1 © 2019 by The Harvard Law Review Association THE SUPREME COURT 2018 TERM FOREWORD: ABOLITION CONSTITUTIONALISM Dorothy E. Roberts CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................................ 3 I. THE NEW ABOLITIONISTS .................................................................................................. 11 A. The Prison Industrial Complex and the Carceral State ............................................... 12 B. Abolition Praxis: Past, Present, Future .......................................................................... 19 1. Slavery Origins .............................................................................................................. 19 (a) Police ....................................................................................................................... 20 (b) Prisons ..................................................................................................................... 29 (c) Death Penalty ......................................................................................................... 38 2. Not a Malfunction. ....................................................................................................... 42 3. A Society Without Prisons. ......................................................................................... 43 C. The Unfinished Abolition Struggle .................................................................................. 48 II. ABOLITION AND THE CONSTITUTION ............................................................................. 49 A. The Settler-Colonial and Slavery Constitution .............................................................. 51 B. The Radical History of the Reconstruction Amendments ............................................. 54 C. The Reconstruction Constitution ..................................................................................... 62 D. The Court’s Anti-Abolition Jurisprudence ...................................................................... 71 1. Constitutional Counterrevolution ............................................................................... 73 2. The Court’s Current Anti-Abolition Doctrines .......................................................... 75 (a) Colorblindness ......................................................................................................... 77 (b) Discriminatory Purpose Requirement ................................................................. 85 (c) Fear of Too Much Justice ...................................................................................... 90 E. Flowers v. Mississippi ....................................................................................................... 93 1. Justice Kavanaugh’s Compromise. .............................................................................. 94 2. Applying Abolition Constitutionalism to Flowers .................................................... 99 III. TOWARD A NEW ABOLITION CONSTITUTIONALISM ................................................. 105 A. Approaching the Constitution Instrumentally .............................................................. 105 1 2 HARVARD LAW REVIEW [Vol. 133:1 1. Holding Courts and Legislatures to an Abolitionist Reading ............................... 110 2. Nonreformist Abolitionist Reforms ........................................................................... 114 3. Treating the Symptoms While Ending the Disease ................................................ 118 4. Creating the Conditions for a Society Without Prisons ........................................ 119 B. Imagining a Freedom Constitutionalism ....................................................................... 120 CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................................. 122 THE SUPREME COURT 2018 TERM FOREWORD: ABOLITION CONSTITUTIONALISM Dorothy E. Roberts∗ Slavery has been fruitful in giving itself names . and you and I and all of us had better wait and see what new form this old monster will assume, in what new skin this old snake will come forth next. — Frederick Douglass1 You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time. — Angela Y. Davis2 INTRODUCTION n 1997, Curtis Flowers was charged with murdering four employees I of the Tardy Furniture store in the small Mississippi town of Winona.3 Flowers is black.4 Three of the victims, including the store’s owner, Bertha Tardy, were white, and one was black.5 Flowers was tried for ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– ∗ George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology, University of Pennsylvania; Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights, University of Pennsylvania Law School; Professor of Africana Studies and Professor of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania School of Arts & Sciences. The author thanks Mitchell Berman, Maggie Blackhawk, Jean Galbraith, Paul Heaton, Seth Kreimer, Serena Mayeri, Donald Moore, Shaun Ossei-Owusu, James Pope, Andrea Ritchie, and Tobias Wolff for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this Foreword. The author is indebted to University of Pennsylvania Law School students Madison Gray, Bridget Lavender, Anthony Sacco, and James Thompson for outstanding and dedicated re- search assistance, to Timothy Von Dulm and the Biddle Law Library staff for excellent research services, and to the editors of the Harvard Law Review for rigorous editorial support. 1 FREDERICK DOUGLASS, The Need for Continuing Anti-Slavery Work, in FREDERICK DOUGLASS: SELECTED SPEECHES AND WRITINGS 577, 579 (Philip S. Foner & Yuval Taylor eds., Lawrence Hill Books 1999) (1950–75). 2 Angela Y. Davis, Distinguished Professor Emerita, Univ. of Cal., Santa Cruz, Lecture at Southern Illinois University Carbondale (Feb. 13, 2014). 3 Flowers v. Mississippi, 139 S. Ct. 2228, 2236 (2019). 4 Id. 5 See In the Dark: July 16, 1996, at 5:43–6:20, APM REP. (May 1, 2018), https://podcasts. apple.com/us/podcast/id1148175292 [https://perma.cc/H44A-SDJK]. 3 4 HARVARD LAW REVIEW [Vol. 133:1 capital murder six times by the same white prosecutor, Doug Evans.6 More than two decades after Flowers was first sentenced to death, his case reached the U.S. Supreme Court on one issue: whether Evans’s jury selection tactics in the sixth trial violated Flowers’s Fourteenth Amendment rights.7 By that point, the prosecutor’s scheme for getting a capital conviction of a black man was crystal clear: Evans “relent- less[ly]” sought to try Flowers before an all-white jury.8 Over the course of six trials, Evans used peremptory challenges to strike forty-one of forty-two prospective black jurors.9 On June 21, 2019, the Court overturned Flowers’s conviction.10 In a 7-2 decision, written by Justice Kavanaugh,11 the Court held that the prosecutor’s blatant pattern of racial discrimination was so “extraordi- nary” that it violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.12 In dissent, Justice Thomas, who excused Evans’s strikes of black jurors as “race-neutral,”13 found solace in one aspect of the ma- jority’s decision: “The State is perfectly free to convict Curtis Flowers again.”14 Flowers remains incarcerated; upon his release from death row, he will be taken into local custody again, awaiting a decision from the State regarding the possibility of a seventh trial.15 As Flowers v. Mississippi16 indicates, criminal procedure and pun- ishment in the United States still function to maintain forms of racial subordination that originated in the institution of slavery — despite the dominant constitutional narrative that those forms of subordination were abolished. Key aspects of carceral law enforcement — police, pris- ons, and the death penalty — can be traced back to slavery and the white supremacist regime that replaced slavery after white terror nulli- fied Reconstruction. Criminal punishment has been instrumental in re- instating the subjugated status of black people and preserving a racial capitalist power structure. Many individuals have therefore concluded that the answer to per- sistent injustice in criminal law enforcement is not reform; it is prison ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 6 See id.; Flowers, 139 S. Ct. at 2236. 7 See Flowers, 139 S. Ct. at 2234–35, 2238. 8 Id. at 2246. 9 See id. at 2235. 10 See id. at 2228, 2251. 11 Id. at 2229. 12 Id. at 2251; see id. at 2242 (“Equal justice under law requires a criminal trial free of racial discrimination in the jury selection process.”). 13 Id. at 2253 (Thomas, J., dissenting). 14 Id. at 2274. 15 See Alissa Zhu, Supreme Court Sided with Curtis Flowers. He Remains in Prison. What’s Next?, MISS. CLARION LEDGER (June 27, 2019), https://www.clarionledger.com/ story/news/2019/06/27/supreme-court-sided-curtis-flowers-he-still-prison-whats-next-forwinona- mississippi-man/1552081001 [https://perma.cc/HLN7-TMTS]. 16 139 S. Ct. 2228. 2019] THE SUPREME COURT — FOREWORD 5 abolition.17 Incarcerated people have rebelled against prisons through spontaneous uprisings, organized protests, and legal claims since the 1960s.18 Some activists mark the launch of the current prison abolition movement as occurring at an international conference and strategy ses- sion, Critical Resistance: Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex, held at the University