Wayman Newton - Terrorism at home: Justice, Florida style

While most Americans are concentrating on the war on terrorism and safeguarding the world from the "axis of evil," officials in Florida have quietly resumed their efforts to hijack American democracy.

In Starke, Fla., population 5,142, a town in which the local state prison is the lifeblood of the economy, three former prison guards were recently acquitted of the 1999 murder of death row inmate Frank Valdes.

In spite of the fact that the guards' lawyers publicly conceded that some prison guards had murdered Valdes and the state Corrections Department had fired the three guards and six of their compatriots for beating Valdes the day before his death, the jury was still not convinced and the guards were acquitted. It took three months to find enough jurors with no ties to the prison. There were five weeks of testimony and arguments. And it took the jury only three and a half hours to deliver its verdict.

From the start, the trial was unfair and biased. Even the prosecution recognized that an impartial jury was impossible in Starke, motioning for a change of venue. But officials were intent on holding the trial in Bradford County.

The defense's original theory about Valdes' death claimed that he committed suicide. Guards were said to have seen Valdes climb onto his cell bars and repeatedly throw himself backwards, striking his bed and falling onto the concrete floor.

But this argument was abandoned after expert witnesses revealed that Valdes' injuries were similar to those of a plane crash victim -- not the sort of wounds that are generally self-inflicted.

Autopsies performed by the state and the Valdes family revealed that Valdes' jaw, collarbone, shoulder, spine, breastbone and nose were fractured and that his heart and diaphragm were bruised. Twenty-two out of 24 of his ribs were broken. There were visible boot marks on his neck and chest. And there were no fingerprints on the cell bars Valdes supposedly threw himself from.

With its suicide argument crumbling, the defense decided to concede that guards had murdered Valdes, but not the three on trial. Capitalizing on the fact that the guards were to be tried in three groups, the defense was able to fault the other guards. Sadly, this "blame-the-other-guy" strategy eventually paid off with an acquittal.

The not guilty verdicts in this case and that of another guard last October have led prosecutors to question whether it is worth the money to try the other five.

This is despicable hypocrisy -- letting murderers go unpunished while we are leading a worldwide crusade against such crimes against humanity. And its yet another example of an ongoing problem in our country: justice reserved for the rich and powerful.

Egregious acts of injustice, like the Valdes case, occur everyday in the criminal justice system. From poor people getting inadequate and inept legal counsel to African American and Latino youths receiving harsher sentences than white youth for comparable crimes, the system is fraught with glaring instances of discrimination, bias and inequality.

People like to trumpet the resilience of Americans, but the daily injustices promulgated by our law enforcement bureaus and courts strain the resilience of some progress. Incidents such as the Valdes murder have serious ramifications and consequences which must be addressed with the same fervor as the war on terrorism. Some would argue that we are on the path toward an ultimate resolution -- a time when such incidents will cease. But why should we have to wait for brutal, racially-motivated murders to stop?

Valdes' murder may seem trivial in comparison to Osama bin Laden's acts of terror, but it is an act of terrorism all the same. It, along with countless other terrorist acts against minorities, produces the same feeling -- fear. What's more, it makes it hard for those groups to identify with America and as Americans.

As the United States works to rid the world of the "axis of evil," we must make sure that we aren't part of such an alliance. Letting a prisoner's killers get away with murder simply because the state doesn't want to spend the money to find and convict them doesn't put us too far from the likes of Iran, Iraq or North Korea.

If we as a nation are truly committed to winning the war on terrorism, we must not discriminate when it comes to fighting terrorists, attacking all with the same enthusiasm and diligence in fighting. If we cannot protect our own citizens from the tyranny of domestic terrorism, than what's the point of fighting it abroad?

Wayman Newton is a senior Political Science major from Birmingham, AL.

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