Just Another Pregnant Black Woman Jailed Unjustly

By William Boardman, Reader Supported News

22 April 18

Siwatu-Salama Ra stood her ground in Michigan. Black people can’t do that.

etroit’s attitude toward guns is supposed to be different. In December 2013, Detroit’s chief of police publicly encouraged Detroit residents to arm themselves legally. Two years later Chief James Craig observed, “When you look at the city of Detroit, we’re kind of leading the way in terms of urban areas with law-abiding citizens carrying guns.”

By the summer of 2017, Siwatu-Salama Ra was one of Detroit’s lawful gun owners and an active community leader who believed she had a right to stand her ground when threatened with vehicular attack at home. Now she’s 26, married, pregnant with her second child, sentenced to two years in prison for a nonviolent gun offense, and facing the prospect of giving birth in jail while shackled. That’s the way they do it in Michigan. Sometimes, during hard labor, they take the shackles off for a while.

Siwatu-Salama Ra was sentenced and incarcerated on March 1, but her story has been slow to get much media attention. It is a Kafkaesque nightmare of systemic incompetence, irrationality, and injustice. A search of the Detroit Free Press produced no results for “Siwatu-Salama Ra.” The Grio ran a piece on March 6 by Patrisse Khan-Cullors, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter, calling out the ugly dishonesty of America’s current hate-filled politics:

We can’t expect gun lobbyists to come to this Black woman’s defense for standing her ground and we know that anti-choice activists will never lift a finger to prevent an unborn Black child from going to jail. Siwatu’s case only highlights the linked contradictions of these two right wing movements. We must take on her case ourselves and navigate within a criminal justice system that unfortunately continues to be steeped in hypocrisy.

If anything, that characterization is an understatement. Siwatu-Salama Ra has spent the past decade as an activist, working to change the system and improve the lives of the people of Detroit. Now, it seems, the Michigan justice system – police, courts, prisons – is paying her back with an excess of the vicious cruelty it usually lavishes on despised minorities. Fighting some powerful establishment forces, she was outspoken, honest, and insistent. As the Detroit Metro Times described her recently:

Siwatu-Salama Ra is the kind of young Detroiter who inspires hope. Raised between Northwest Detroit and California, the black mom began fighting for environmental justice in the city at just 19 years old, taking on polluters like Southwest Detroit’s Marathon Oil Refinery and the Detroit Renewable Power trash incinerator.

Now, seven years later, the 26-year-old is the co-director of the Cass Corridor’s East Michigan Environmental Action Council. In recent years she channeled her energy toward educating other young Detroit moms about nutrition and how to avoid harmful chemicals in food. Before that, she developed programs in Detroit schools to engage kids in environmental causes, and some of those students are now graduating college and building their own careers around environmental justice. She represented Detroit in events at the Paris Climate talks, and is organizing a large conference in the city that will bring together environmentalists from around the nation in May.

The freakish sequence of events that put her in prison began late on a Sunday afternoon in July 2017 (described in detail on DemocracyNOW! April 18). Siwatu-Salama Ra and her two-year-old daughter were at home in the single-family house where she lives with her mother, sister, brother, and nieces. Ra and her mother, Rhonda Anderson, were sitting on the front porch, watching the two-year-old play in Ra’s parked car. Ra’s 14-year-old niece (Rhondish’s grandchild) was inside. Unexpectedly, a 38-year-old acquaintance, Chanell Harvey, drove up unannounced, dropped off her 14-year-old daughter to play with Ra’s niece, and left hurriedly. Some weeks earlier the girls had had a falling out because the Harvey girl reportedly “beat up” Ra’s niece in a bathroom at school. The girls had apparently made up in the interim, but Ra and her mother knew only about the violent incident. Ra called the sister, who had not given her daughter permission to have this friend visit. Under protest from both 14-year-olds, the friend called Chantell Harvey to come pick her up. When Harvey arrived about ten minutes later, she was “very upset, very angry,” according to Ra:

She started yelling at me, screaming at me, cursing at me. In the midst of this, I’m asking this woman to leave, right? I’m asking her to leave, just go, you know, and she wouldn’t. And so the next thing that she did was ram her car into my car. Plus, my baby was in the car. She was in the car playing. That shocked fear in me, and I jumped and got my baby out of the car. So, she’s literally going back and forth with this car, putting it in reverse and fixing herself to come at us again and go after my mom. My mother, who was also standing very close to me, wasn’t able to run.

Ra’s mother confirms this, saying, “She was so close to hitting me that I can feel the car on my clothes.” Harvey, with her daughter in the car, continued to lurch it forward and back, without hitting anyone or anything else, until Ra went to the glove box in her car and pulled out her licensed handgun. Knowing it was not loaded, Ra pointed it at Harvey. Harvey stopped, took three pictures of Ra with her cell phone, then left. The squabble might have ended there, when the only damage was what Harvey had inflicted on the side of Ra’s car running into it.

Harvey escalated her response, going directly to the nearest Detroit Police station to file a complaint against Ra. A few hours later, Ra went to the same station to file a complaint of her own. At that point, one might think the Detroit police would investigate the case before moving ahead. One would be wrong. For whatever brain-dead reason, the Detroit police have a policy that the first one in the door becomes the complainant, the victim, the unquestioned righteous testifier. The other party is mindlessly labeled the “aggressor” and nothing she can do will change that. Her own affidavit becomes a legal nullity to which the justice system gives no weight. Because Siwatu-Salama Ra filed her report second – and for no other reason, apparently – Ra was permanently considered “aggressor,” even though Chanell Harvey had attacked her, her mother, and her car. Attorney Victoria Burton-Harris described this strange police policy:

And it was testified at trial by the investigating officer, the officer in charge, that their practice is, when a report is made and someone is noted as the aggressor, they are not allowed to speak to that person. There is no interview that is had with that aggressor. So, when Siwatu made a police report, she was never considered a victim. Her police report went nowhere, because it was made second. She was already, by the time she made her police report, again, deemed to be the aggressor. So no one followed up with Siwatu. No one did an interview with Siwatu. Siwatu was not called back to the station two weeks after she made her report, like the complaining witness and her daughter were, to give a written statement.

That was July 17, after which, by their own account, the police did no investigation to determine any facts and made no credible assessment of the alleged facts they had. On August 3 the police sought and got a warrant for Ra’s arrest, then sent a SWAT team to arrest her. She was arraigned on August 29 on two counts of felonious assault and one firearm felony. On its face this farce has no reasonable justice-based explanation, raising questions as to what was really going on among the participants, known and unknown.

It’s reasonable to assume that, even before the complaints were filed, both women were well known to police and others in the justice system.

On April 5, 2015, Chanell Chatell Harvey was charged with two counts of felonious assault with a deadly weapon and two other felony firearm counts, including possession by a felon. On April 22 the police got a warrant for her arrest as a habitual offender. She was arraigned on December 13, pleading not guilty by standing mute. On February 26, 2016, Harvey entered into a plea deal, pleading guilty to one count of felonious assault with the other three charges dismissed. On April 4, 2016, Harvey was sentenced to three months in Wayne County Jail, followed by two years probation (which would include the July 2017 incident with Siwatu-Salama Ra).

By then, Ra had established a very public persona as an environmental activist over the previous decade. In November 2013, a 54-year-old white male homeowner, living alone, shot and killed a drunken, unarmed 19-year-old black girl who was on his front porch at 4:30 a.m., pounding on his door, looking for help several hours after she’d had a car accident. Wayne County prosecutors were slow making up their minds what if anything to do about it. There were public Black Lives Matter protests and one of the leaders was Siwatu-Salama Ra, then 22. Under a 2006 Michigan law, the homeowner had a right of self-defense, but that depended on whether he credibly believed his life was in danger. Almost a year later, a jury convicted the homeowner of second-degree murder and a judge sentenced him to 17 years in prison, including a mandatory two years required by a Michigan weapons law. He had failed to persuade the jury of his right to a stand your ground defense. On March 9, 2018, the Michigan Supreme Court rejected the homeowner’s appeal of the judge’s jury instructions on self-defense.

There is perhaps no way to know what impact any knowledge of these two women had on the attitudes or decisions of authorities. But it is more than passing strange that the habitual offender somehow comes off preferentially to the habitual challenger to authority. How do any of these people justify their roles in this process? While Harvey’s version of events may have swayed the jury despite internal inconsistencies, she also had three other versions in the course of the case. How do police, prosecutors, judges, jurors, jailers tell themselves it’s OK to decide, against the overwhelming preponderance of the evidence, that a victim, a pregnant young black woman, deserves to be jailed in primitive, punishing conditions?

Lurking in the charges against Siwatu-Salama Ra was the possibility of a mandatory sentence, enacted by the Michigan legislature as a delusory “deterrent.” As University of Minnesota law professor Michael Tonry wrote in 2009, in an unwitting prediction of the outcome of Ra’s case:

There is no credible evidence that the enactment or implementation of such [mandatory] sentences has significant deterrent effects, but there is massive evidence, which has accumulated for two centuries, that mandatory minimums foster circumvention by judges, juries, and prosecutors; reduce accountability and transparency; produce injustices in many cases; and result in wide unwarranted disparities in the handling of similar cases.

Siwatu-Salama Ra’s trial was its own kind of special farce, starting with an all-white judge and jury. The judge, Thomas John Hathaway (sworn in in 2017), has a respectable resume that includes no experience relevant to a case like this. He told the jury it would be a two-day trial, but it ran five days over two weeks. On the fifth day, jury deliberations were pressured by an approaching snowstorm. The judge told the jury if they didn’t decide, they’d have to come back the next day. As it turned out, court was closed the next day because of the storm.

Meanwhile the jury reached an incomprehensible decision. None of them would talk about it afterwards. What they decided was that Siwatu-Salama Ra was guilty of assaulting Chanell Harvey in her car, but not guilty of assaulting Harvey’s daughter in the same car at the same time. The assault, consisting of pointing an empty handgun at the car, somehow managed to assault only one of the people in the car, according to the jury, hurrying to get home ahead of the storm.

Other indications of jury distraction to the point of irresponsibility were the jury notes to the judge during the trial. The notes concerned irrelevant but charged questions about why Ra’s two-year-old daughter was in a car with a gun in the glove box. This had nothing to do with the charges. It’s not clear whether the judge gave the jury a clear instruction to stick to the case at hand, as was his duty. Ra’s attorney, Victoria Burton-Harris thinks the irresponsible outcome was unrelated to the merits of the case:

I believe that they couldn’t come to an agreement so they said, “Let’s just split the baby.”

What the jury didn’t know, because the judge didn’t tell them, which is legitimate in Michigan, is that any guilty verdict on the felony firearm charge would mean an automatic two-year sentence under Michigan’s arbitrary gun law. The judge sentenced Ra to two years of probation on the felonious assault charge. This is similar to what a different judge had sentenced Harvey to on an identical charge. Harvey’s felony firearm charge – with its two-year mandatory sentence – was dismissed as part of her plea bargain that included three months in jail.

For reasons that are not apparent, Siwatu-Salama Ra has not been granted release on bail while her lawyers pursue an appeal. Judge Hathaway denied a motion to delay sentencing till after Ra gives birth. Her first pregnancy had complications that are expected to be repeated in her current pregnancy, so compassionate release would seem a no-brainer. But the Detroit justice system has shown no brains from beginning to end in this case. And now the prison system is doing its part by providing the seven-months-pregnant mother with poor health care and treatment. According to attorney Burton-Harris, on a recent trip to the hospital for treatment of an infection that caused contractions, guards shackled her so tightly it was tantamount to torture:

They put the shackles so tight around her ankles that she couldn't even walk and lost all feeling in her feet. She’s six to seven months pregnant, so ankles are already swollen. She doesn’t have access to good health care, and it’s totally inhumane to shackle a pregnant woman’s feet to a bed as she’s getting a vaginal exam.

Ra is a practicing Muslim and is subject to religious discrimination, according to court filings. CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, charges the Michigan Department of Corrections with violating Ra’s constitutional right to free expression of religion by serving her food with pork products, denying her a hijab, and denying her access to a Qur’an or religious visitation. A prison spokesman more or less denies the claims. This sort of discrimination is not a new issue with Michigan prisons.

The Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office, which is as responsible for this travesty of justice as any of the player, has a reasonable mission statement:

The mission of the Wayne County Prosecutor's Office is to pursue justice, to safeguard the community by demanding accountability for those who commit crimes and to enhance the quality of life by changing the culture of violence.

By every measure of their own criteria, the prosecutors – and the rest of the justice system – failed to pursue justice, failed to safeguard the community, failed to demand accountability, and did nothing to change the culture of violence. They have all participated in an apparently gross miscarriage of justice – “Let’s just split the baby” – that threatens to be literally lethal for an unborn child.

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William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.