The System Finds “No Evidence” that Police Murdered Freddie Gray...
But Reveals a WORLD OF EVIDENCE that THE WHOLE DAMN SYSTEM IS GUILTY AS HELL!

June 27, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

The arrest of Freddie Gray
The arrest of Freddie Gray

On June 23, this system found Caesar Goodson—one of the police who murdered Freddie Gray in Baltimore—“Not Guilty.” Their prosecutors couldn’t or wouldn’t present evidence, and their judge couldn’t or wouldn’t find evidence that the pig who bashed Freddie Gray’s brutalized and broken body around on a 40 minute plus “rough ride,” committed what this system defines as a crime. No evidence picking up a young healthy man, and leaving him near dead, constituted a crime.

THAT—IN AND OF ITSELF—is evidence ENOUGH that this WHOLE DAMN SYSTEM IS GUILTY AS HELL.

Millions of people saw video of Freddie Gray tortured and brutalized by police. They folded up his thin fragile body like a pretzel. His screams of pain were heard a block away in the Gilmor Homes where Black people are locked down in a prison-like conditions. He was dragged—while witnesses yelled, “he can’t move his legs!”—into a pig paddy wagon. And then for 44 minutes his battered and broken body was bashed into the steel walls of the police truck as he got what every Black person in Baltimore knows is a trademark of the Baltimore pigs—the “rough ride.”

NONE of that made it into Goodson’s trial. What kind of a “justice” system is that? It is a “justice” system that functions to cover up police murder!

The Goodson verdict and everything that led up to it was a damning indictment of the so-called justice system. So... what is the response of this system? Is it that there needs to be a whole reboot of how this is all going down? Did some higher court or authority step in, vowing to fix this?

Just the opposite! Instead of outraged calls for justice, all kinds of voices in the power structure in Baltimore and beyond are calling on the prosecutor to drop the remaining cases. They are demanding that the pig who supervised the murder of Freddie Gray never go to trial and that the ones who bent him like a pretzel should go free without even the kind of farcical trial Goodson (and those before him) had.

Why are we still fighting for justice in 2015?

"Why are we still fighting for justice in 2015?" is a clip from the film REVOLUTION AND RELIGION: The Fight for Emancipation and the Role of Religion; A Dialogue Between CORNEL WEST & BOB AVAKIAN. Watch the entire film of the November 2014 dialogue here.

What does that tell you about what kind of system this is? That instead of outrage at the injustice of the unpunished police murder of a Black man, those with power and influence are saying just let them all walk?!

Facing Outrage... Orchestrating IN-Justice

Police in America shoot and kill unarmed people of color all the time and rarely get charged. (See, for example, “14 Times Cops Walked In 2015 After Shooting People To Death,” Huffington Post, December 29, 2015.) Again: yet MORE EVIDENCE that this is a system of exploitation and oppression backed by violence and terror here—along with their constant unjust terror and wars around the world.

But after Freddie Gray was murdered by police, youth of Baltimore rose up—with fury. They threw a wrench into the gears of injustice. And their actions posed to everyone that this murdering system is wrong, and that it is not all-powerful. When the youth refused to be bullied, insulted, and brutalized by pigs, and lit up the skies of Baltimore, the whole world had to deal with the fact that Freddie Gray’s murder was racist, was unjust, and that there were people who were not gonna take it.

Immediately the system lashed back. They brought out the National Guard. People got hit with vicious charges. Barack Obama himself called the youth “thugs” while saying no such thing about the police who brutally murdered Freddie Gray.

But many people—and not just those who experience police terror every day—weren’t buying the bullshit. Two days after the rebellion, thousands of students marched for justice for Freddie Gray. And that included students from Baltimore’s elite, mostly white Johns Hopkins University—people who, had it not been for the rebellion, might have gone about their lives unaware of, or tuning out, the brutality and oppression faced by people in housing projects that might be just a mile away.

Prominent, respected voices in society called out Obama and refused to condemn the rebellion and stood with the youth. In the midst of the uprising, CNN commentator and Morehouse College Professor Marc Lamont Hill declared that people were right to have “righteous rage, righteous indignation in the face of state violence and extrajudicial killing.”

And here you saw evidence of something else: that revolution is not just necessary but possible. You saw the potential—if there is revolutionary leadership—for those who catch the most hell every day under this system to become the backbone of an actual revolution that could draw in and win support from broad sections of society.

Those who rule over all this could not see “evidence” for convicting the murderers of Freddie Gray. But they could see evidence that the allegiance of sections of people they count on to support their system might fray, unravel, or even turn against them, and that the outrage from wide sections of people was undermining the legitimacy of the rulers’ monopoly on the use of violence that maintains a system of exploitation and oppression.

THAT is why they made a call to bring charges against the murdering police in this case. And that is why from the moment they did so, they orchestrated letting these pigs walk free.

A Criminal Cover-up

There is only one way to make any sense of the way the trial of Goodson was conducted: It has been A CRIMINAL COVER-UP BY A CRIMINAL SYSTEM.

The judge broke the cases down into six separate trials, chopping the crime into pieces and covering up the real story, allowing them to—as Carl Dix put it—let the pigs walk “on the installment plan.” The prosecutors relied on the testimony of pigs—who throughout the first trials, over and over, while supposedly testifying for the prosecution, actually undercut what evidence, if any, the prosecutors presented.

The system put a Black judge—Barry Williams—in front of the trial, and hyped him as someone who prosecuted police brutality when he worked for the U.S. Department of Justice, trying to pimp off the utterly undeserved reputation of the DOJ as opposing police brutality sometimes.

And at the end of this obscene “trial,” the judge ruled there was “no evidence” presented that Goodson “knew or should have known of the acute distress Mr. Gray may have been in at that time” and that there wasn’t even evidence presented that there is such a thing as a “rough ride” or that one occurred.

What IS the Solution?

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What kind of system runs a trial where truth and justice don’t even make an appearance in their courts, especially when one of their killers in blue murders a Black man? It is a system that wages unjust wars of terror, that degrades and violently oppresses women, that has declared open season on immigrants, and that is destroying the environment at a manic pace. And it is a system ENFORCED by police like the ones who murdered Freddie Gray, and a court system that gives them a green light to do so.

And it is a system whose TIME IS UP. A system that cannot be made right. That will take REVOLUTION NOTHING LESS.

What does that mean now? It starts here: “The Revolutionary Communist Party IS ORGANIZING NOW TO OVERTHROW THIS SYSTEM AT THE SOONEST POSSIBLE TIME. Preparing to lead an actual revolution to bring about a radically new and better society: the New Socialist Republic in North America.” That Message is on this website. Get into that. Get with that. Get with the Revolution Club.

What’s needed is YOU.

May 2, 2015
Baltimore, May 2, 2015. Photo: Special to revcom.us/Revolution

 

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