The past two weeks has been one of the most difficult and painful periods in America since the attack on September 11, 2001.
Two African-American men were killed during police encounters that were captured on cell phones. Five police officers in Dallas were ambushed and murdered by a gunman as they provided security to a peaceful march protesting the earlier shootings.
In Baton Rouge, Louisiana this morning a gunman killed three police officers and wounded four others. At this writing, other than his age and identity, nothing about him or why he did it is known.
Additional protests during this period have led to scores of arrests in cities across the country. The atmosphere is tense, polarizing and is escalating.
Thirty-five years ago, as a criminal defense lawyer, I was involved in a case in which four Syracuse Police officers were charged with beating a Latino man in Upstate Medical Center parking lot while trying to arrest him. During the struggle to put handcuffs on him, he suffered a heart attack and died several weeks later.
The struggle to arrest him was being viewed by a security guard and hospital orderly on a grainy black and white television monitor whose camera was trained on the parking lot. These two witnesses claimed that the officers struck their suspect in the head with a nightstick.
The incident occurred in September 1980 and for the next nine months Syracusans were divided about what the outcome of the criminal proceedings should be. Public pressure exerted on the District Attorney’s office to indict by some groups in the community was intense and an indictment was returned charging them with a felony assault and lesser offenses.
The case went to trial before a jury in April and May of 1981. Medical testimony by Upstate physicians was conclusive that the deceased had suffered only an inch long cut on the head that was not caused by a nightstick and he had suffered two heart attacks previously.
The jury took less than half an hour to find all of the officers not guilty but the healing in the community and of the officers themselves took much longer.
My client, the only veteran of the force, vowed that he would never arrest anyone again.
He didn’t.
He spent the remainder of his career in the Records Division.
Another officer left the force entirely.
A third transferred to another department.
Thirty-five years later, we live in the digital age. Almost everyone has a cell phone with a camera capable of recording videos that can be uploaded to the internet. It is occurring with increasing frequency and the public is arriving at conclusions based on those videos even when the video is a partial one or incomplete. Protests are immediate, tensions are high and rhetoric becomes overheated.
The madman who murdered and injured twelve in Dallas , a city which had no connection to the shootings in Minnesota and Louisiana, where the protest march was peaceful and the police a welcome presence, was inspired by the anger and rhetoric that was manifest following those shootings.
That is what happens when there are madmen among us.
There will always be mad men among us.
Black Lives do matter.
The right to protest peacefully is one that is enshrined in the First Amendment of our Constitution and should be celebrated rather than condemned.
We also need to have faith in the other institutions of government. We need to let them conduct the kind of thorough and complete investigation that is required of these tragic incidents and let them hold whoever needs to be accountable without rushing to judgement.
We need to talk to each other rather than over each other or past each other.
We need to stop and take a breath.