A Healing Jury: Paul Butler Courts Olympus

by Frederick B. Hudson

"The house in which African Americans reside is on fire."

Photo of Professor Paul Butler courtesy of the author

He found himself prosecuting mostly black defendants in the District of Columbia criminal courts. He noticed the pride that the almost totally black jurors showed when he rose in the court to represent the interests of the United States government. But a race pride honed by his mother and other ancestors could not allow him to reflect of certain grim statistics compiled by the government he served-black people represent about 13 percent of people who use drugs but constitute 75 percent of people who are imprisoned for drug crimes.

Since Butler had noticed significant drug use on the white college campuses he attended, he knew that black drug use was not tremendously higher than that of whites. How then to reconcile the solemn fact that almost half of the black people he and his fellow prosecutors propelled to jail cells were there for drug crimes.

After he left the prosecutorial minefields and began teaching law-a challenge he saw as a challenge to interpret and imagine, he thought about the words of novelist Toni Morrison who drew the moral dilemma of a black man who was in a compromising position: "you have taken your birthright and sold it for a mess of pottage."

This reference to the biblical story of Esau and Jacob, the older son who abdicated his responsibilities as the older son to his brother, only to forced into exile, has resonance for Butler and all blacks in positions of responsibility. Those left behind the currents of affirmative action are the charges left to us by Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, Fanny Lou Hamer and other architects of our struggle. When we walk away from the obligations imposed upon us by good fortune and education, we have exiled ourselves into a place where we will wish for death and not find it.

Caught on the horns of this racist bull, Butler was fired by the words of Malcolm X who said that the oppressed should not look to the oppressor for some logic to explain the conditions of captivity, Butler wrote a article which was published in the prestigious Yale Law Journal in December 1995 . This article looked to precedents in the Common Law of England which upheld the right of a juror to acquit a defendant despite the guilt of the accused or the judge's instruction-the juror or the entire jury votes its conscience.

This article loosed a flood of troubled water by the white media. Butler was interviewed on 60 Minutes, featured on all the major network new programs, and discussed on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.

The suggestion that even nonviolent black criminals be set free was abhorrent to many Americans, some black.

Butler counters these objections by noting that Martin Luther King's nonviolent movement was predicated on the conviction that a citizen has the duty , not just the right to defy an unjust law.

He notes that the disruption in the lives of incarcerated defendants and their families by years behind bars constitutes harm which cannot wait for 'the majority" of voters to appreciate.

Butler challenges the society to spend more money on the financial and health service to poor children and their families-a solution the Rand Corporation found prevents crime. There is a tradition recorded in Greek mythology called the wounded healer.

This stemmed from a centaur called Chiron who was wounded by heroic divinity then becomes a sojourner in both the Underworld and Olympus. Chiron's wound shapes his destiny. His wound is a divine selection. We learn that his wound (his mark, his identity) is what enables him to travel between the human world, the Underworld, and the Divine world. Psychologists have found that many respectable citizens bear deep soul wounds which are felt as sadness, loss, and emptiness. A sense of shame, of being less than.

A vision develops in the wounded one, one that is grandiose, and which features him or her as a central figure. He or she will see self as the possessor of a special insight, and will develop a charisma. That is, he stands at the aperture between 'normal' society, and the Outlands.

This enables him to never accept others at face value, to not be shocked by the shadows of the human soul. It also enables him to see the prisons that people construct for themselves, and to identify paths out. If they are lucky, their skirmishes with the Wound will lead them into the Underworld of their own souls. They will return with the humility necessary to enact true, compassionate healing.

Our community is full of wounded healers. When we accept our pains, our insecurities and our longing for reconnection with those often scorned, the jurors in criminal cases involving nonviolent offenders can rise to new levels of activism after the use of nullification. One of the architects of the American Revolution, Thomas Paine defined the call of democracy as the realization that "we have it in our power to begin the world again." This call to action can resonate in aware jurors.

After the trial, they can reach out to the defendant and try to refer him or her to social, economic, and personal counseling agencies to strengthen the self worth of one who appears in the defendant's chair. The former jurors can become activists in meetings with their police departments-challenging arrest strategies which focus on low level drug users and ignore the masterminds of the enterprise.

They can work with local employers to review their policies towards employing individuals with criminal and drug abuse histories. Black jurors can thus truly serve as representatives of their community-and to each other. Vaclav Havel, noted dramatist, essayist, and president of the Czech Republic who served four years in prison for his beliefs, wrote "some of us are guilty, but all are responsible."

By touching our own wounds ripped by a brutal society, we can find the water, hold the hoses that can tame the fires. For it is not our neighbor's house aflame, it is ours.

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