Manchild In JUSTUS America.

I can't even begin to imagine how Michael Anthony Green feels about all of those 27 years he spent behind bars for something he did not do.  Nor can I imagine how many other men of color who have experienced or are experiencing what he has been through feel.

His youth was stolen by a justice system that has never been fair to men of color.  A system that people of color refer to as "JUSTUS" instead of justice because they've always been the ones that were dealt a bogus hand with the cards stacked against them.  Nevertheless, something is terribly wrong with our justice system when it targets a certain group of people to reap unfair injustice. Is it the real reason why the scales of lady justice tilts to one side?  Does that scale in reality symbolize the unfair sentences and injustice done to people of color. 

Many men of color in prisons have swore that they were innocence and are ignored time and time again only to be released when their youth is gone and discovery made that they were really innocent all the time. Like Green many of their loved ones died while they were in prison and they were not allowed to attend their funeral or grieve with their families in private.  Or young women they may have intended to marry, married someone else. Their children grew up without a father and the men were added to the statistical list of no fathers in the home.

How is it in our society that a police who murders an unarmed young black man who is not a threat in front of witnesses is automatically not guilty?  Yet and still, men of color are automatically assumed guilty in America?  Most Americans know and admit that there is something wrong with our justice system when it comes to people of color.  When will our lawmakers fix it, is the question.  Even the slight law change in the disparities of crack and powder, although a start, did not completely eliminate the disparities. Senator Lamar Smith (GOP) feels that blacks should be locked up longer than whites for crack.  Apparently,  the Senator is looking out for those drug lords at the top of the cocaine drug business, because crack is made from powder cocaine, but then those at the top are white, mostly the corporate elite, and government folks.

These innocent men of color were forced to live like caged animals in cells with violent and insane criminals. They were forced to live in a world foreign to them with different codes of prison ethics, depression, and prisoner society laws that involve skin color gang wars that would affect the average human being's mind.  Having to ask for permission to do something as simple as take a shower or other freedoms that a free person enjoys and sometimes take for granted is the hand dealt to them for crimes they did not commit.

No privacy with letters written to them by their loved ones or telephone calls made by them to their loved ones because they are labeled convicts not to be trusted. Visits from their loved ones are not always guaranteed either due to any slight technicality and their visitors give up their rights while visiting and are treated like prisoners because they too are not to be trusted.  Prison rapes of the weak and a fight to survive and stay alive while serving  their prison terms has suddenly become a horrible reality. Their name becomes a number and they are no longer in charge of their own life.

After DNA testing proves their innocence they are still subject to a hearing/trial for a final ruling on their innocence that they have to go through before they are fully exonerated and a bail has to be paid.  You would think that after all they've been through that the the justice system wouldn't want to subject them to this last insult to their innocence.  However, such is not the case.  In some states they will receive a large monetary settlement and a few benefits,  but will the money turn back the hands of time and give them their youth back?