Dean Strang on US Social Justice

I was greeted by an affable Dean Strang in the sunny alcove of a Cork restaurant just a few minutes before he was due to go on stage at UCC. Later that evening the lawyer was also going to be speaking with his friend and co-worker Jerry Buting at Cork Opera House about the intrinsics of the US justice system. This was the central focus for Motley’s conversation with Mr Strang, but one thing quickly became clear – this in fact touches many other areas of US society.

Firstly, a question I think that many viewers of the Emmy Award winning show Making a Murderer have pondered, is just how many Steven Avery's are there out there? "There have now been about 1,700 exonerations just through DNA," Mr Strang tells us. "There are I think reasonable estimates that about 3%  of people in Jail may be innocent of the crimes for which they are convicted."

This is quite a staggering figure and to put it in perspective, last year 2,220,300 were incarcerated in the US. This means that there could be 66,609 men and women like Steven Avery decaying in US institutions. Mr Strang is quick to add that: “As you might imagine, many more say they’re innocent, then actually are. Proving innocence is harder than proving guilt in a way”. And therein lies the irony in a system which proudly boasts innocence until guilt is proven.

Frustration in US society is prominent and these frustrations are manifesting themselves through movements like Black Lives Matter. “Well, Black Lives Matter is a response to I think a whole collage of social factors. Probably the most immediate catalyst for the Black Lives Matter movement has been the role of the police in communities. Although the role of the courts also, while not a catalyst for the Black Lives Matter movement, has been a certain contributing factor, because the mass incarceration that the US has been on since the 1980’s has so proportionately affected people of colour. At a rate of three or four times the rest of the population.”

In 2015, 2,306 African Americans out of every 100,000 were imprisoned and this compares with 450 when looking at the caucasian population. Black Lives Matter essentially spawned out of a spate of police shootings. However as a police chief in New York highlighted to me some months back over a pint of Murphy’s, it is difficult for a policeman to decipher in a split second whether that’s a cell phone, or a phony gun. Police now find themselves in a difficult situation: Perform defensive policing and be branded uncaring, or perform their job and risk ridicule.

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