(Photo Courtesy of Lowell Sun)
“Yusef Salaam speaks to the audience and shares his experiences being wrongfully incarcerated.”
Nate Coady
Connector Contributor
As Black History Month continues, The Office of Multicultural Affairs brought a panel to UMass Lowell on February 16 consisting of Executive Director of the New England Innocence Project (NEIP) Radha Natarajan, Assistant Professor of Psychology Miko M. Wilford, Assistant Criminal Justice Professor Erica Gagne and Dr. Yusef Salaam, a member of “The Exonerated Five.” Salaam spent 6 years and 8 months in prison for a crime he did not commit.
The panel’s title, “Now We See You: The Wrongful Conviction and Incarceration of Yusef Salaam,” focused on the issue of mass incarceration and wrongful convictions that plagues the criminal justice system today. The conversation was moderated by Professor Gagne, who began questions with Radha Natarajan and the NEIP. They are an organization that works to represent people who are wrongfully convicted, prevent wrongful convictions whenever possible, and provide a community of those who have dealt with the same experiences.
The Exoneree Network is a group created by the NEIP to help exonerees. The group members are also exonerees who understand the struggle and humiliation that comes with the system essentially failing what it is supposed to do. The vast majority of wrongfully convicted are people of color. “What you believe about the system is not playing out,” says Natarajan, who has also worked as a public defender.
She says that wrongful convictions are the result of a multitude of shortcomings by the government that involve procedural errors as well as cultural and human biases. Prosecutors have unilateral charging discretion, coupled with the fact that most cases don’t make it to trial. They end at plea bargaining. This leads to defendants being cornered into taking guilty pleas for long sentences unheard of in foreign countries for charges that the defense has no say in. With no room for inevitable human errors or corrupt participants, innocent people are placed into the custody of the state all the time. Natarajan says, “there has to be an interrogation on whether or not the community is being protected.”
Salaam’s story highlights the few who are not protected, who are betrayed by the system that is supposed to seek justice. A teenager at the time, Salaam was wrongfully sentenced in 1990 with four other teenagers for the crime of rape in a decade-defining case that drew national attention. Former President Donald Trump infamously paid for a full page advertisement in The New York Times calling on the death penalty.
Salaam, Korey Wise, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana and Antron McCray are their names, and they were simply present at Central Park at the time the crime was committed. They were arrested and interrogated for hours. Authorities pressured them to confess to a crime they did not know occurred. They were asked to speak against each other, when they didn’t even know each other. It was clear they were victims of racial profiling, coerced into a confession that fit a certain narrative. Regarding those taped interviews, Salaam said, “they can press your buttons and when they turn on the cameras, they call you crazy.”
His story speaks to the times when this country’s justice system, in all its complexity, is circumvented by corruption or lack of diligence. “They’re counting on you to participate in your own demise,” is how Salaam described his process through the system. Professor Wilford, as an expert in eyewitness memory and decision-making, talked about the important changes that need to be made in order to make trials more fair. She questioned the legitimacy of in-court identifications and stressed the importance of determining whether evidence is probative or prejudicial. Wilford mentioned that the victim in the Central Park Jogger case was called to testify, even though she couldn’t remember anything from the night of the crime.
The point Wilford and everyone on the panel were trying to make is that people need to look at the system and scrutinize what is wrong and what is right. What is an injustice for some is an injustice for all. UMass Lowell has a sizable criminal justice program. Salaam’s story serves as a reminder for those who want to work in that field, that there is still much work to be done.
At the end of the panel, Salaam signed copies of his memoir “Better, Not Bitter: Living on Purpose in the Pursuit of Racial Justice” which also serves as a good takeaway. Bitterness is a hindrance. The goal is to improve the system. The NEIP works out of compassion for those neglected by the system. They work so that those who feel abandoned have someone in their corner, in an attempt to change what Salaam calls: “the Criminal System of Injustice.”
