No Justice, No Peace: UVA & Marisa Alexander

A first year student was gang raped at UVA, and it took a Rolling Stone article (TW) to get anyone to pay attention.

It turns out UVA doesn’t even expel people who have admitted to rape.

Those of us who teach gender studies are assumed to be pessimistic at best and paranoid at worst, but you read two facts like that and wow, we’re just right.

Or you read that Marisa Alexander – the woman who fired a warning shot because she feared for her own life after her husband barged through a door she had locked herself behind and grabbed her by the neck – and all that 9 days after she’d given birth – was convicted and given 20 years in prison. She managed to plea down to 3, but why is she serving any time at all? She didn’t, mind you, kill or injure anyone.

Jeff Severs, a friend of a friend, after reading Wilson’s testimony about Mike Brown – which is something like a compendium of the racist imagination of black bodies as monstrous – wrote that “Brown’s body is bound to bear so horribly, impossibly much”.

As was that student’s, as was Marisa Alexander’s, and in none of these cases is there any justice, any condemnation of the objectification and othering of these bodies and the lives they carry.

I hate being right. I hate that my view of the world as unjust-by-design is so obviously, patently true. You can explain away Grand Jury history (well, actually, you can’t) or you can point up the peculiarities of the criminal justice system, but really, when university administrators are ignoring rape confessions and a woman who was defending herself is found guilty and given 20 years to serve – and who was, mind you, statistically more likely to die at her partner’s hands precisely because she was pregnant or had just given birth – that is, she had a better reason for self-defense than most, and far more than Darren Wilson ever needed – you have to know this system was designed to keep most of us in our places.

Bill Hicks was right, too, except they don’t even bother to tell you to pick up the gun anymore. They don’t have to.

Defense Attorney Reveals Culture’s Transphobia

First: At least some justice has been served in the case of Amanda Gonzalez-Andujar, who was killed in March 2010. So at least there has been some justice for another trans woman who was killed by a tranphobic, violent man. Up to 40 years in prison for Rasheen Everett, who apparently was violent toward his girlfriends who weren’t trans, too.

But it was the defense attorney’s transphobic bullshit that really irked me. During the sentencing hearing, as Everett was facing a sentence of 29 years to life, his defense attorney asked:

“Shouldn’t that [sentence] be reserved for people who are guilty of killing certain classes of individuals?” he reportedly asked, adding, “Who is the victim in this case? Is the victim a person in the higher end of the community?”

And then he pointed to Gonzalez-Andujar’s own history, as if, somehow, killing someone who’d had some shit happen in their own life somehow made this violent murder “less bad”. The attorney also referred to Gonzalez-Andujar as “he”.

But Queens Supreme Court Justice Richard Buchter, who described Everett as “coldhearted and violent menace to society,” didn’t take too kindly to Scarpa’s argument. “This court believes every human life in sacred,” he said. “It’s not easy living as a transgender, and I commend the family for supporting her.”

Well done, Justice Butchter.

4 Indicted in Steubenville For Attempted Cover-Up

Some good news:

Now, , Steubenville City Schools Superintendent Michael McVey has been “charged with tampering with evidence, obstruction of justice and falsification.” Also charged: elementary school principal Lynette Gorman, for alleged failure to report child abuse; wrestling coach Seth Fluharty, for alleged failure to report child abuse; and volunteer football coach Matthew Bellardine, “who faces charges allowing underage drinking, obstructing official business, falsification, and contributing to the delinquency of a minor.”

Wow. Actual people being held accountable. What a breath of fresh air.