Marissa Alexander, 31 years old, African-American mother of three, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for firing what she maintains was a warning shot at her abusive husband. Alexander had turned down a plea bargain that would have seen her jailed for three years. She insisted she had been defending herself when she fired a shot into a wall near her husband, and she attempted to use Florida’s Stand Your Ground law in her defense. But in March 2012, the jury convicted her, after only 12 minutes of deliberation. She was sentenced to 20 years behind bars under a Florida law known as “10-20-Life” that carries a mandatory minimum for certain gun crimes regardless of the circumstance. The case against her was argued by Angela Corey, the same prosecutor in charge of the case against George Zimmerman.
Well, to protest her imprisonment, as well as the acquittal of George Zimmerman, a coalition of Southern community organizations has been marching in a, quote, “Walk for Dignity.” They began Monday in Jacksonville, Florida, where Alexander was convicted, and have been walking since then to Sanford, Florida, where Trayvon Martin was killed.
Aleta Alston-Toure talking:
Zimmerman got away with murder. And we’re trying to say, through the Walk for Dignity, that the shift now is from a legal crisis to a human crisis. And that’s because the decades of the prison crisis is now out of hand. It’s totally out of hand. We looked in the past at those that said, “I am a man,” and now we’re saying, “I am human.” We are trying to right now just make a statement that we’re taking action. We’re taking action by walking together as organizations, as youth, to do something together to change those things. And the two demands that we have is the resignation of Angela Corey, clearly, because she is profiting. Her career is to lock people up. She is a politician. And we clearly are saying also that we want to have the release of Marissa Alexander. And enough is enough.
Seema Iyer talking:
the concept of the prosecutor being a politician, or what under the law says the prosecutor’s duty is, and that is to be a minister of justice. And there are many prosecutors across this country who do ride that line. And that is, some cases need to be prosecuted, some people do need to be locked up, and some cases need to be dismissed.
Aleta Alston-Toure talking:
We want to close the gaps of those that cause victims to be, you know, lost in the system. And to do that, we’ve really got to look at the criminalization of women. Beth Richie wrote a book called Arrested Justice. And right now we know that we’ve got to get the anti-domestic violence and the sexual violence groups to know what it is the impact of Stand Your Ground legislation means when we say, “I am human.” And we do know that this will have to have justice, and we will be able to see Marissa, because this is out of control, again, because of the decades of the prison crisis and because of this thing called slavery by another name. It’s intentional disregard of the law. It’s deliberate indifference.
– source democracynow.org
Aleta Alston-Toure, founder of the New Jim Crow Movement in Jacksonville, Florida, where she has been organizing on behalf of Marissa Alexander. She is one of the coordinators of the Walk for Dignity march.