Too Many of Them Have Been Wrong’: Black Ex-Prosecutor Exposes Misdeeds of Los Angeles Legal System In Volume of Online Stories

Share

Explore Our Galleries

A man stands in front of the Djingareyber mosque on February 4, 2016 in Timbuktu, central Mali. 
Mali's fabled city of Timbuktu on February 4 celebrated the recovery of its historic mausoleums, destroyed during an Islamist takeover of northern Mali in 2012 and rebuilt thanks to UN cultural agency UNESCO.
TO GO WITH AFP STORY BY SEBASTIEN RIEUSSEC / AFP / SÉBASTIEN RIEUSSEC
African Peoples Before Captivity
Shackles from Slave Ship Henrietta Marie
Kidnapped: The Middle Passage
Enslaved family picking cotton
Nearly Three Centuries Of Enslavement
Image of the first black members of Congress
Reconstruction: A Brief Glimpse of Freedom
The Lynching of Laura Nelson_May_1911 200x200
One Hundred Years of Jim Crow
Civil Rights protest in Alabama
I Am Somebody! The Struggle for Justice
Black Lives Matter movement
NOW: Free At Last?
#15-Beitler photo best TF reduced size
Memorial to the Victims of Lynching
hands raised black background
The Freedom-Lovers’ Roll Call Wall
Frozen custard in Milwaukee's Bronzeville
Special Exhibits
Dr. James Cameron
Portraiture of Resistance

Breaking News!

Today's news and culture by Black and other reporters in the Black and mainstream media.

Ways to Support ABHM?

An ex-prosecutor’s online memoir is turning heads in La La Land’s legal community.

By Matt Bruce, Atlanta Black Star

For the past six weeks, a former L.A. County deputy district attorney has authored a series of real life stories detailing his 12-year career at the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office. He’s releasing the stories on Medium, an open publishing platform, under the pen name Spooky Brown, Esq.

The tales are a diary of disillusionment detailing the power struggle the former prosecutor endured trying to fight the good fight in a powerful assembly-line system of incarceration. He shares four specific stories rife with corruption, callousness, coercion and flat-out lies that he witnessed from police investigators and fellow prosecutors involved in the cases he handled.

“Most of the time, my supervisors have been white, and the people charged have been Black and Brown,” Spooky Brown wrote. “While some of those decisions have been right, too many of them have been wrong — dead wrong.”

The Atlanta Black Star has confirmed Spooky Brown’s true identity and verified he’s been a licensed L.A. County attorney since 2007. We are not identifying him to protect him from retaliation.

(Courtesy of Spooky Brown, Esq)

The Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office is the largest local prosecutorial office in the nation, with a brigade of 1,000 attorneys and 300 investigators pushing close to 200,000 cases through the courts each year. The area they serve is the nation’s most populous county, with 10.2 million residents.

Spooky Brown dissects that system in his series of stories. He takes a no-holds-barred approach in the anecdotes, diving headlong into them with headlines like “When Police & Prosecutors Are Partners in Crime” and “When Innocence is Inconvenient.” Last month, Spooky penned an open letter to outgoing L.A. County District Attorney Jackie Lacey, urging her to treat her Black female employees better.

That won’t be necessary much longer. Lacey was voted out of office eight days after he posted the letter…

Read the full article here

Learn more about Use of Force here and here

More Breaking News here

Comments Are Welcome

Note: We moderate submissions in order to create a space for meaningful dialogue, a space where museum visitors – adults and youth –– can exchange informed, thoughtful, and relevant comments that add value to our exhibits.

Racial slurs, personal attacks, obscenity, profanity, and SHOUTING do not meet the above standard. Such comments are posted in the exhibit Hateful Speech. Commercial promotions, impersonations, and incoherent comments likewise fail to meet our goals, so will not be posted. Submissions longer than 120 words will be shortened.

See our full Comments Policy here.

Leave a Comment