Outrage in the Bronx!
Judge Tosses Indictment Against Cop Who Murdered Ramarley Graham
by Carl Dix | May 16, 2013 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Ramarley Graham, gunned down by police inside his family's home on February 2, 2012
On May 15, a judge in the Bronx, New York, threw out the indictment against Richard Haste, the NYPD Officer who gunned down 18-year-old Ramarley Graham inside his family’s home while Ramarley’s grandmother and 6-year-old brother watched in horror. The judge said he had to toss the indictment because the prosecutor had given faulty instructions to the grand jury that indicted Haste.
How come judges never throw out indictments on our youth when prosecutors manufacture evidence to railroad them into prison? Or when cops get up on the witness stand and tell lies on them? How come the prosecutors are so skillful in sending Black and Latino youth to prison in such horrific numbers that the U.S. has more people in prison than any other country on earth, but they forget how to prosecute when the defendants are cops who brutalize and even murder our youth?
This comes down to another case of the criminal injustice system working to exonerate a cop who murdered a Black youth. Cops kill people all the damn time. Most of those they kill are either Black or Latino, are unarmed and doing nothing wrong when they are killed by police who are sworn to protect and serve. Yet killer cops are seldom if ever put on trial, and they are rarely punished in any way for killing people.
In this case, you can see the whole system working to get this murdering cop off. News reports on the indictment being tossed out also contained supposedly sealed information from Ramarley Graham’s juvenile record that branded him a repeat offender. And they were full of police lies intended to paint Ramarley as a criminal that the cops were justified in treating him like he was guilty until proven innocent. Only Ramarley Graham didn’t survive his encounter with Richard Haste to even get a chance to try and prove his innocence.
Radio and newspaper reports claim that Ramarley ran from the cops who had to chase him to his home. But surveillance video from the apartment building shows Ramarley walking up to his door. It also shows the cops who came after him trying to break down the door. One of those cops forced his way into the apartment and gunned down Ramarley in cold blood. On top of all that, the cops then took Ramarley’s grandmother into custody and held her for interrogation. They refused to let family and friends who came down to the police station talk to her for hours. At first, they wouldn’t even let a lawyer in to see her.
A big part of why Richard Haste faced charges for murdering Ramarley was that this police murder was met with mass protests on the streets of the Bronx. And now there is an urgent need for people to get back out in the streets to make clear that exonerating this murderer will not be tolerated by the people.
We need to live in a world where shit like this doesn’t go down all the damned time; a world where those who are responsible for public safety would sooner put their own lives on the line than kill or injure an innocent person. It’ll take Revolution—Nothing Less to bring that kind of world into being. People going into the street to manifest their rage against this outrage and raising their heads as they fight back, getting a clearer sense of what is the source of this official brutality and murder and what it’ll take to get rid of it once and for all is an important part of enabling growing numbers of people to see the need for and possibility of revolution to sweep this and all the other horrors this system enforces on people away once and for all.
Justice for Ramarley Graham!
Jail the Killer Cop, Richard Haste!
The System Is the Problem; Revolution—Nothing Less, Is the Solution!
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