Probably the only thing the defense and the prosecution sides in the Mumia Abu-Jamal case would agree on is that the burden lies with the defense team to win him a retrial. Under the governing federal statute, the defense has to provide clear and convincing evidence that there was such endemic unfairness at the original trial that it was impossible for the defense to prove its case.
“It’s the ‘no harm, no foul’ approach,” says Daniel Williams, one of two lead attorneys defending Abu-Jamal. “The presumption of innocence only applies before a conviction. Now we have the affirmative burden of creating a very real doubt that Mumia ever had a chance. We have to show not that the trial was unfair in technical terms, but rather that it was so qualitatively unfair overall that had the unfairness not occurred, there’s a reasonable probability that the outcome would have been different.”
“They have to show that something was horribly wrong, so horribly unfair they couldn’t prove whatever it was they were trying to prove,” agrees Assistant District Attorney Hugh Burns, from his vantage on the prosecution team.
So,were there horrible wrongs in Abu-Jamal’s first trial?
“No,” prosecutor Burns answers, his voice angry but controlled. “The people who are supporting Jamal don’t care what the facts are and don’t care to know. Their claims are based on a fantasy world of what might have happened and what could have happened instead of what we know did happen.”
Abu-Jamal’s death sentence is now on hold; his attorneys have filed a habeas corpus petition seeking a new trial, and Burns will file his reply by early February 2000.
Meanwhile, loyalists are politicized and mobilized on both sides of the issue. It’s an election year. We’ve lived through Rodney King, O.J. Simpson, Abner Louima, Amadou Diallo. In Abu-Jamal’s case, one man — police officer Daniel Faulkner — is dead and another stands on the edge of his own open grave. Could the stakes possibly be higher?
Online, the confrontation is bitterly waged between those supporting Abu-Jamal and those opposed.
Amidst a massive amount of international coverage, perhaps only one author, Stuart Taylor, has been able to rise above the din surrounding this case to produce a dispassionate legal analysis; in his 1995 article for American Lawyer magazine, Taylor firmly concluded that Abu-Jamal deserves a retrial.
Taylor is hardly a squishy liberal. He is the reporter generally credited with single-handedly transforming the media view that Paula Jones’ allegations were not credible into the belated realization that she in fact had a viable case. He therefore probably changed history, and helped set the nation on the path to last year’s impeachment crisis. Yet, unlike his role in the Jones case, Taylor’s pronouncement in 1995 that Abu-Jamal’s trial had essentially been a sham met with a thundering silence from his colleagues in the mainstream press.
In his quest for a new trial, Abu-Jamal’s claims cluster around the contention that he was convicted on the basis of three flawed factors: (1) concocted confessions, (2) unreliable eyewitnesses who had reason to lie and (3) a biased judge who excluded blacks from the jury and suppressed exculpatory evidence.
The Confessions
“I shot the motherfucker, and I hope the motherfucker dies.”
Two months after the shooting, hospital security guard Priscilla Durham reported to police that she had heard Abu-Jamal yell out this dramatic confession twice from the emergency room floor while about 14 or so police officers tried to subdue him the night of the crime. None of the police officers had reported Abu-Jamal’s incriminating statement.
Officer Gary Wakshul, who had ridden with Abu-Jamal to the hospital, at first reported that the suspect had “made no comments.” Two months days later, however, Wakshul stated that Abu-Jamal had in fact confessed to him that night. The police officer explained that he hadn’t realized at first that the confession was of any importance.
It took Officer Gary Bell, Faulkner’s former partner and best friend, about two and a half months to remember that he, too, had heard Abu-Jamal confess. He said that had initially been too traumatized at his friend’s brutal murder to appreciate the importance of what he had heard on the night of the crime.
The Witnesses
As an outspoken political radical and a Black Panther, Abu-Jamal had been monitored by police since his early teens. He had a mammoth FBI dossier, and he claims to have been beaten by police numerous times. Yet, he had never been charged previously with committing an act of violence. When I asked Assistant D.A. Burns why he thought the heretofore non-violent Abu-Jamal would callously execute Faulkner and then brag about it, the question seemed to surprise him.
“I don’t know. He was well known for having a grudge against the system, being anti-police. [Officer Faulkner] had hit — subdued — Jamal’s brother, who had been resisting arrest, striking an officer.” (A charge to which the brother subsequently pled guilty.)
Of course, proof beyond a reasonable doubt of malicious, unprovoked killing with “deliberation and premeditation” are required for a first-degree murder conviction — the charge which sent Abu-Jamal to death row. What Burns is describing is not premeditated and, as he seems to implictly admit, defending one’s brother is a natural human impulse. In the eyes of the law, this is not first-degree murder.
According to the prosecution’s reconstruction of the case, Abu-Jamal decided in an instant to shoot Faulkner in the back from close range, then did nothing while the wounded officer (who was facing at least two assailants and wielding either a flashlight or billy club) turned, unholstered his weapon and fired, striking Jamal in the chest. Faulkner fell to the ground whereupon Abu-Jamal fired more shots at his upper body before coolly finishing the prone officer off with a bullet between the eyes.
“Its not my theory, I don’t need a theory,” Burns says forcefully. “That’s eyewitness testimony.”
At the scene, cab-driver eyewitness Robert Chobert at first told police he’d seen the shooter run away but subsequently identified Abu-Jamal in the paddy wagon. Other witnesses say Abu-Jamal never ran; he was found 4 feet from Faulkner, gravely wounded. Later, Chobert altered his story, saying the shooter didn’t get far, maybe 30 or 35 steps (about 100 feet).
Neither could Chobert consistently identify the shooter’s physical characteristics or his clothing. The jury never learned of his first statement, wherein the shooter “ran away”. Even more damning, the jury was not told that Chobert had a drunk-driving record for which his license was suspended both on the night of the murder and during the trial. The jury also didn’t learn that Chobert was on probation for arson-for-hire and had asked the authorities for help with his various legal problems. (Abu-Jamal’s defense didn’t know some of these things either.)
Prostitute Veronica Jones attempted to testify, according to Jamal’s former counsel, Anthony Jackson, that the police had offered to let her work unmolested if she’d finger Mumia. She claimed that was the same deal police had given Cynthia White, one of their star witnesses. The Judge barred all such testimony and struck the portion Jones had managed to blurt out from the record. Jones, the Faulkner Web site details, was a heavy drug user with a hefty rap sheet.
Prostitute Cynthia White’s version of events evolved as well, each time becoming more helpful for the prosecution even as her version failed to gibe with others’ significant details. White, though, would seem to have received little in return for what Jamal supporters claim was her deal with the police; because she was arrested several more times. However, Abu-Jamal claims White was arrested because she recanted or was about to. The prosecution denies that White ever recanted or would have. White is now dead.
There are more witnesses, with similarly conflicting memories and statements.
The Judge
“Nobody tried before Judge [Albert] Sabo got a fair trial,” Stephen Bright of the Southern Center for Human Rights says. “He’s the country’s leading hanging judge.”
Prosecutor Burns disagrees: “Judge Albert Sabo is a jurist of impeccable credentials who conducted a scrupulously fair trial in the midst of terrible conditions created by Jamal himself.”
It’s true that Abu-Jamal’s behavior during the trial bordered on the psychotic. He insisted on representing himself and on having John Africa, a local activist and non-lawyer, sit at counsel table with him. He indulged in outbursts and insults and treated his court appointed attorney, Anthony Jackson, with outright contempt.
Abu-Jamal was ejected from his own trial numerous times. During jury selection, part of which Abu-Jamal conducted himself, some prospective jurors confided to Judge Sabo that the defendant “scared them to death” by his manner.
Abu-Jamal’s supporters charge that Judge Sabo allowed the prosecutors to inflame the jury’s fears by repeating Abu-Jamal’s youthful pro-Black Panther pronouncements from 12 years before (when he was 15). It is a well-settled issue in the law, however, that a defendant’s abstract beliefs cannot be used unless they are directly relevant to the crime at hand.
So, should Abu-Jamal get a new trial?
Tucker Carlson, a conservative journalist who has written about Abu-Jamal’s
case, probably speaks for most people when he says, “Look, I’m horrified by the thought of innocent people in jail. But you can’t just poke holes at what happened. You have to tell us why this guy is innocent.”
For the majority, it all comes down to that, of course. Those who want to see Abu-Jamal denied a retrial harp on the fact that neither he, nor his brother, have ever explained what happened that morning. (Defense attorney Williams counters that Abu-Jamal will tell his story in court if and when he is granted a new trial.)
But Abu-Jamal is under no legal obligation to tell his story. And the real point here is not in fact Abu-Jamal’s guilt or innocence. The point is whether or not he got a fair trial. Under our judicial system, fairness of process is the only way civilized people can have confidence that guilt and innocence have been determined, since we can’t read minds.
If Abu-Jamal was not fairly tried, then he should be retried. Fairly, the way any one of us would want to be tried were the power of the state to haul us into court, and especially were the state poised to take our lives. You cannot
believe in the rule of law, or our constitutional system of democracy and disagree with that proposition.
So, was his original trial fair? No. It was certainly typical in many ways, however. Poor and minority defendants often face rushed trials defended by outgunned public defenders in our criminal justice system. They often face prosecutorial “irregularities” as well.
For their part, police and prosecutors are confronted with an overflow of perpetrators who are guilty at the least of something, if not the specific crime as charged. And jurors of all races routinely send people to prison on the basis of scanty or contradictory evidence and/or conflicting testimony. The difference in Abu-Jamal’s case is that a poor black defendant has somehow become a celebrity.
In the end, Abu-Jamal is probably going to use his celebrity status to do what O.J. did — buy himself some reasonable doubt. He’s probably going to get a retrial where the prosecution will have to put up a real fight — and he probably deserves one.
Did Abu-Jamal shoot Officer Faulkner? He probably did.
Premeditatedly? Probably not.
Before or after Faulkner shot him? This is a very important question and one the federal court should focus on. Faulkner likely was in legitimate fear for his life and fired on Abu-Jamal, who was running toward him, and who then returned the fire.
What about the unidentified man who some witnesses said fled the scene? That needs to be thoroughly investigated, as was not done in the first trial.
Stuart Taylor believes that the best hope for a retrial lies in a judgment of ineffective assistance of counsel. “That’s the best way to sugar-coat a reversal. Judge Sabo is shockingly biased but courts don’t like to have to say that about other judges.”
If the federal court grapples directly with Judge Sabo’s handling of the trial, we can have faith in their ultimate decision. If they do not, there will certainly be more Mumia Abu-Jamals to come, and poor and minority communities perhaps be forgiven if their faith in the system continues to crumble.
In the end, justice for dead policeman Daniel Faulkner, cut down in the prime of his life and leaving a young widow whose life is forever scarred, will not be served by executing a framed man.
Not even if he is guilty.
The black T-shirt — so tight, so come-hither. And oh, those safari button-downs — joke-worthy on Eddie Bauer mannequins, but on news correspondents, so … enticing.
America missed these sartorial seductions, pined for their sweet suggestive nothings. And now, finally, a nation of television addicts can thank its disaster pornographers for bringing back the lurid garments — and the lustful voyeurism they evoke.
Yes, thousands of miles from the San Fernando Valley’s seedy studios, the adult entertainment business is alive and panting in Haiti. This year’s luminaries aren’t the industry’s typical muscle-bound mustaches of machismo — they are NBC’s Brian Williams pillow-talking to the camera in his Indiana Jones garb, CNN’s Sanjay Gupta playing doctor and, of course, CNN’s Anderson Cooper in that two-sizes-too-small T-shirt “rarely missing an opportunity to showcase his buff physique,” as The New York Times gushed. They are all the disaster porn stars in the media with visions of Peabodys and Pulitzers dancing in their heads.
And we the ogling people drink it in.
Like any X-rated content, this smut is all flesh and no substantive plot. The lens flits between body parts and journalists pulling perverse Cronkite-in-Vietnam impressions (at one point, CNN showed Cooper and his T-shirt saving a child). But there is little discussion of how western Hispaniola was a man-made disaster before an earthquake made it a natural one.
Though neighboring the planet’s wealthiest nation, Haiti has long been one of the world’s poorest places. It sports 80 percent unemployment and a GDP smaller than the annual executive bonus fund at a single Wall Street bank. The destitution is tragic — and a reflection, in part, of colonial domination.
For much of the last two centuries, Western powers used embargo threats to force the country’s population of erstwhile slaves to reimburse their former European masters for lost “property.” As Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates recounts, America aided these efforts from the beginning because President Thomas Jefferson feared a successful black republic would “inspire slave insurrections throughout the American South.”
Crushed by this oppression, Haiti was then assaulted in the 1990s by American “free” trade policies that destroyed its agriculture economy and tried to turn the country into the world’s sweatshop. In recent years, as the menace of Western-backed coups lurked, Haiti has at times been compelled to pay more interest on its debt than it received in foreign aid.
This is the real story of Haiti that the black T-shirts and safari button-downs (and, alas, their viewers) have never cared about. They’ve only noticed the country when a cataclysm provided more telegenic images than the daily death and despair of the island’s pre-earthquake squalor.
Even now, as the casualty count rises, disaster pornographers barely mention the macabre history. They know that doing so would break unspoken rules against holding up a foreign policy mirror to America and against riling the politicians and business interests that contributed to Haiti’s demise.
Rather than reporting on what made Haiti so poor and therefore its infrastructure so susceptible to collapse, we get clips of Haitians momentarily cheering “USA!” as food packages trickle into their devastated capital. Rather than inquiries about how poverty made Haiti so ill-prepared for rescue operations, the disaster pornographers instead obediently follow George W. Bush, who self-servingly says, “You’ve got to deal with the desperation and there ought to be no politicization of that.”
“Politicization” — so that’s the safe-for-TV euphemism they’re using these days, huh? Evidently, it must be avoided — evidently, nothing kills an audience’s heaving passion faster than “politics” or (God forbid) contextualized news.
Anything like that — anything beyond the exploitation of raw disaster porn — well, it might ruin the money shot.
Hispaniola, 1999.
“Sorry, no, it’s too dangerous,” says the driver.
“Um. OK.” To the best of my knowledge and experience, Port-au-Prince is the only place in the world where a cabby will refuse a $20 bill to take a pilot into town for a quick tour. Where else, I don’t know. Maybe Monrovia or Freetown during the wars there?
I’m in Haiti for 90 minutes, on a two-stop turn out of Miami. I was awake before dawn to the roar of the air-conditioning unit when the phone rang, the scheduler rattling off the report time for an afternoon trip to Port-au-Prince and Santo Domingo — a three-leg out-and-back.
This means a grand tour of sorts of Hispaniola, the island shared in an east-west split between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, whose capitals we’ll be stopping in. The border between these nations is one of the few international demarcations clearly visible from 30,000 feet — the latter’s green tropical carpet abutting a Haitian deathscape of denuded hillsides the color of sawdust. You could argue that Hispaniola is perhaps the least glamorous landfall in the Caribbean. But you can’t beat the weather and the on-board pineapple tray.
With nothing else to do I wander the Port-au-Prince apron. Behind our dormant freighter a row of scarred, treeless hills bakes in the noon heat, raped for charcoal by millions of hungry Haitians. In front of the terminal, men ride past on donkeys and women balance baskets atop their heads. Somebody has started a cooking fire on the sidewalk. Haiti is the poorest country in the entire Western Hemisphere, and the squalor along the airport perimeter is at least as distressing as anything I’ve seen in Africa.
And, how to say this, it smells. If you’ve ever been to the tropics, maybe you’ll understand: It’s not a bad or foul smell, necessarily, and this isn’t to be taken as some Ugly American pejorative of things foreign or other-skinned. But it’s pungent. For those who live with changing seasons, it’s like the smell of a neighbor’s fireplace or wood stove on the first cold night of the year. Except it has no season; it’s simply always there, ceaseless and permeating like the heat of the Sahara or the numbness of a glacier. It’s the odor of rain forests burned, of foliage, charcoal and garbage incinerated — these destructive, ubiquitous pastimes of the Third World — and it hits you the second you step from an airplane in almost every latitudinally challenged republic on earth.
I notice a pallet of large white drums being unloaded from our airplane. Something doesn’t look right — crew member intuition — and, concerned that we’d accidentally transported some hazardous material, I ask a loader if he knows what the barrels contain. A forklift carries them to a corner of a ramshackle warehouse, and the driver pries off one of the heavy plastic lids.
What’s revealed is a tangled white mass of what appears to be string cheese floating in dirty water. A vague, quiveringly rotten smell rises from the liquid. The driver sticks in his hand and gives the ugly congealment a churn. “For sausage,” he answers. What we’re looking at, it turns out, is a barrel full of intestines — casings to be stuffed with meat at some horrible Haitian factory. Why the casings need to be imported while the meat itself is apparently on hand, I can’t say, but somebody found it necessary to pay the shipping costs and customs duties to fly 400 gallons of intestines from Miami to Port-au-Prince.
Thirty-three minutes away is Santo Domingo, the filth-and-stucco capital of the Dominican Republic — or the D.R., as savvy travelers and baseball announcers love to call it. The neighborhoods around the airport are some of the poorest on the island, and we’re two days on the heels of a terrible storm. Most of the roofs are missing, and as our jet drops its tires and aims for the runway at Las Américas International, we look straight into the islanders’ concrete-block lives, their belongings violently mingled: plastic bags, rain-soaked clothes, corrugated tin. And in all directions are the triangular, tornado-shaped plumes of garbage fires.
What it lacks in glamour, maybe, Santo Domingo makes up for in history. This is the oldest capital in the New World. With some time to kill, I hire a taxi, this time with no resistance. I’m going to see Christopher Columbus, who died in Spain but whose remains, depending which historian you believe, are interred beneath the cathedral here.
To me there’s something about that name, Santo Domingo, that evokes images of 15th-century explorers, their gray-sailed ships anchored offshore. To others, maybe, it’s thoughts of the slave trade, of indigenous islanders keeling over from those special European gifts of smallpox and typhus. Or boats taking cannonballs through their hulls, bars of gold falling to the ocean floor.
As with every big capital down here, the whiteness of the skyline is striking. White paint is splashed over everything: hotels, apartment blocks, schools. From the highway it looms ahead, clusters of white buildings set against brilliant blue beachfront; against emerald hillsides; against the mushrooming, oil-black storm clouds. And as the taxi brings me closer, I taste and feel that tropical force of humanity and heat — a grimy ooze through every white crack.
Later, in darkness, we’re loading up for the leg home, as it were, to Miami. They’ve unloaded our pallets of automobile parts and tractor tires — tools that will help turn the landscape of this small country into parking lots and strip malls like the rest of the world — and soon we’ll be gone.
I’m in a foul mood, and our captain is a retired Air Force pilot who’s boring us to tears with embellished stories: adventures of earthquakes in Pakistan, crash landings in the Kenyan countryside. He’s old and his face is wrinkled and it makes me miserable to hear him, because who cares, really, about his stories, now that he’s just some old retired serviceman with three ex-wives who’s lost all his hair? And I feel myself, like a disease, turning into the next version of this guy.
I’m tired and I need a shower. I’ve got grease on my shirt. From the metal railing I see the moon. It’s an odd, eerily dangling crescent surrounded by an inky redness, like the moon of the Turkish flag. There’s something wild and strange about it.
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Reports by news outlets have stated that emergency efforts in Haiti have been hampered because the Port-au-Prince airport’s radar was knocked out. Can planes take off or land with no air traffic control radar?
First of all, so that everyone understands, “radar” is a somewhat generic term that can mean different things, the same basic technology used for different purposes. We have cockpit radar, for instance, which is used by crews to detect storms and precipitation. But in this context we’re talking about air traffic control (ATC) radar, which allows controllers to monitor the position, speed and altitude of flights, sequencing them appropriately. There are radar facilities for the higher, en route sectors of airspace, as well as local, or “terminal,” facilities that manage traffic coming and going from particular airports.
But while it might sound primitive, all around the world you will find airports, as well as large swaths of en route airspace, lacking radar coverage. Over the oceans, for example, and in much of Africa. Or at Port-au-Prince. It had no radar even before the earthquake.
Lack of radar means that flights are sequenced “manually” through the use of position reports. Planes on oceanic crossings are spaced by time and altitude along paths or longitude and latitude, sending periodic position reports to distant ATC facilities. In and around airports themselves, controllers handling arrivals and departures will often ask crews for updates on their exact bearing and distance to a particular radio beacon or point-in-space fix, as well as their altitudes, and space them accordingly. Holding patterns are sometimes assigned when multiple flights are inbound, and instructions to turn, climb or descend will sometimes be referenced to fixes, distances or radials. A takeoff clearance might include the following:
“Air Haiti 209, cleared for takeoff. Maintain runway heading until passing 3,000 feet, then turn right on course. Maintain 5,000 feet until passing the 340 radial from the PAP VOR.” Occasionally with climbs or descents there’s a time restriction: “Cleared to climb from level one-three zero to level two-four zero by time one-six four-five. Report reaching. Time now one-six three-five.” In other words, “You’ve got 10 minutes to climb from 13,000 feet to 24,000 feet, and let us know as soon as you get there.”
It sounds old-fashioned — and it is — but it works pretty well, albeit at a much slower pace than at radar-equipped airports. Luckily, if not necessarily, traffic tends to be light at most non-radar airports.
The congestion problem at Port-au-Prince isn’t about radar being “knocked out” (it wasn’t there in the first place), but rather the sudden influx of humanitarian flights into airspace — and tarmac space — that is normally uncrowded. Up to 200 aircraft a day have been arriving at Toussaint Louverture International, with some stacked in holding patterns for 90 minutes or more. At one point all inbound flights from the U.S. were “ground stopped” due to saturation on and around the airport.
In addition, the Port-au-Prince control tower was badly damaged, requiring U.S. military personnel to set up a temporary facility. The media was conflating the terms “control tower” and “radar.” Although tower controllers will use radar, if available, they are not the same things. The loss of the tower, from which aircraft are cleared to taxi, take off and land, was a much more critical issue than a lack of radar it never had.
Speaking of the media, I also heard a CNN reporter describe the Port-au-Prince airport rather emphatically as “tiny.” Not sure what that was about. While it might lack the room for dozens of military transport jets, it’s pretty spacious by Caribbean standards. It has a 10,000-foot runway and a wide rectangular apron.
There is no such thing as “Air Haiti,” by the way. Years ago a small company with that name existed, but today Haiti is one of relatively few countries around the world lacking a national airline. Two others in the region that jump to mind are Guyana and Belize.
As far as earthquakes go, I keep getting asked what might happen if a runway starts shaking just as a jet is taking off or landing. I really don’t know. It depends, I guess, on the severity of the shaking and the speed of the plane. I don’t know what a magnitude 7 temblor feels like, but suffice it to say things would get bumpy. Probably not bumpy enough, however, to damage anything, as aircraft are designed to withstand some pretty severe jolts. As we know, it’s not the shaking of the ground that kills and injures people, but rather buildings falling on top of them. Overall, a plane is probably a pretty safe place to be — much safer than a building.
A runway coming apart is another story. Striking a fissure at high speed would be dangerous — albeit statistically unlikely. I am not aware of anything like that ever happening, although the 1974 disaster film “Earthquake” features a scene where a 707 touches down just as a major temblor hits Los Angeles. The runway fractures and the crew executes a go-around just in the nick of time.
The last scheduled passenger flight to leave Port-au-Prince after the quake was an American Airlines flight to Miami. Presumably the crew ensured that runway conditions were safe. This would have been done by taxiing along the surface, and/or by sending a vehicle out to assess things.
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Do you have questions for Salon’s aviation expert? Contact Patrick Smith through his Web site and look for answers in a future column.
Soon after almost every disaster the crimes begin: ruthless, selfish, indifferent to human suffering, and generating far more suffering. The perpetrators go unpunished and live to commit further crimes against humanity. They care less for human life than for property. They act without regard for consequences.
I’m talking, of course, about those members of the mass media whose misrepresentation of what goes on in disaster often abets and justifies a second wave of disaster. I’m talking about the treatment of sufferers as criminals, both on the ground and in the news, and the endorsement of a shift of resources from rescue to property patrol. They still have blood on their hands from Hurricane Katrina, and they are staining themselves anew in Haiti.
Within days of the Haitian earthquake, for example, the Los Angeles Times ran a series of photographs with captions that kept deploying the word “looting.” One was of a man lying face down on the ground with this caption: “A Haitian police officer ties up a suspected looter who was carrying a bag of evaporated milk.” The man’s sweaty face looks up at the camera, beseeching, anguished.
Another photo was labeled: “Looting continued in Haiti on the third day after the earthquake, although there were more police in downtown Port-au-Prince.” It showed a somber crowd wandering amid shattered piles of concrete in a landscape where, visibly, there could be little worth taking anyway.
A third image was captioned: “A looter makes off with rolls of fabric from an earthquake-wrecked store.” Yet another: “The body of a police officer lies in a Port-au-Prince street. He was accidentally shot by fellow police who mistook him for a looter.”
People were then still trapped alive in the rubble. A translator for Australian TV dug out a toddler who’d survived 68 hours without food or water, orphaned but claimed by an uncle who had lost his pregnant wife. Others were hideously wounded and awaiting medical attention that wasn’t arriving. Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, needed, and still need, water, food, shelter, and first aid. The media in disaster bifurcates. Some step out of their usual “objective” roles to respond with kindness and practical aid. Others bring out the arsenal of clichés and pernicious myths and begin to assault the survivors all over again.
The “looter” in the first photo might well have been taking that milk to starving children and babies, but for the news media that wasn’t the most urgent problem. The “looter” stooped under the weight of two big bolts of fabric might well have been bringing it to now homeless people trying to shelter from a fierce tropical sun under improvised tents.
The pictures do convey desperation, but they don’t convey crime. Except perhaps for that shooting of a fellow police officer — his colleagues were so focused on property that they were reckless when it came to human life, and a man died for no good reason in a landscape already saturated with death.
In recent days, there have been scattered accounts of confrontations involving weapons, and these may be a different matter. But the man with the powdered milk? Is he really a criminal? There may be more to know, but with what I’ve seen I’m not convinced.
What Would You Do?
Imagine, reader, that your city is shattered by a disaster. Your home no longer exists, and you spent what cash was in your pockets days ago. Your credit cards are meaningless because there is no longer any power to run credit-card charges. Actually, there are no longer any storekeepers, any banks, any commerce, or much of anything to buy. The economy has ceased to exist.
By day three, you’re pretty hungry and the water you grabbed on your way out of your house is gone. The thirst is far worse than the hunger. You can go for many days without food, but not water. And in the improvised encampment you settle in, there is an old man near you who seems on the edge of death. He no longer responds when you try to reassure him that this ordeal will surely end. Toddlers are now crying constantly, and their mothers infinitely stressed and distressed.
So you go out to see if any relief organization has finally arrived to distribute anything, only to realize that there are a million others like you stranded with nothing, and there isn’t likely to be anywhere near enough aid any time soon. The guy with the corner store has already given away all his goods to the neighbors. That supply’s long gone by now. No wonder, when you see the chain pharmacy with the shattered windows or the supermarket, you don’t think twice before grabbing a box of PowerBars and a few gallons of water that might keep you alive and help you save a few lives as well.
The old man might not die, the babies might stop their squalling, and the mothers might lose that look on their faces. Other people are calmly wandering in and helping themselves, too. Maybe they’re people like you, and that gallon of milk the fellow near you has taken is going to spoil soon anyway. You haven’t shoplifted since you were 14, and you have plenty of money to your name. But it doesn’t mean anything now.
If you grab that stuff are you a criminal? Should you end up lying in the dirt on your stomach with a cop tying your hands behind your back? Should you end up labeled a looter in the international media? Should you be shot down in the street, since the overreaction in disaster, almost any disaster, often includes the imposition of the death penalty without benefit of trial for suspected minor property crimes?
Or are you a rescuer? Is the survival of disaster victims more important than the preservation of everyday property relations? Is that chain pharmacy more vulnerable, more a victim, more in need of help from the National Guard than you are, or those crying kids, or the thousands still trapped in buildings and soon to die?
It’s pretty obvious what my answers to these questions are, but it isn’t obvious to the mass media. And in disaster after disaster, at least since the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, those in power, those with guns and the force of law behind them, are too often more concerned for property than human life. In an emergency, people can, and do, die from those priorities. Or they get gunned down for minor thefts or imagined thefts. The media not only endorses such outcomes, but regularly, repeatedly, helps prepare the way for, and then eggs on, such a reaction.
If Words Could Kill
We need to banish the word “looting” from the English language. It incites madness and obscures realities.
“Loot,” the noun and the verb, is a word of Hindi origin meaning the spoils of war or other goods seized roughly. As historian Peter Linebaugh points out “At one time loot was the soldier’s pay.” It entered the English language as a good deal of loot from India entered the English economy, both in soldiers’ pockets and as imperial seizures.
After years of interviewing survivors of disasters and reading firsthand accounts and sociological studies from such disasters as the London Blitz and the Mexico City earthquake of 1985, I don’t believe in looting. Two things go on in disasters. The great majority of what happens you could call emergency requisitioning. Someone who could be you, someone in the kind of desperate circumstances I outlined above, takes necessary supplies to sustain human life in the absence of any alternative. Not only would I not call that looting, I wouldn’t even call that theft.
Necessity is a defense for breaking the law in the United States and other countries, though it’s usually applied more to, say, confiscating the car keys of a drunk driver than feeding hungry children. Taking things you don’t need is theft under any circumstances. It is, says the disaster sociologist Enrico Quarantelli, who has been studying the subject for more than half a century, vanishingly rare in most disasters.
Personal gain is the last thing most people are thinking about in the aftermath of a disaster. In that phase, the survivors are almost invariably more altruistic and less attached to their own property, less concerned with the long-term questions of acquisition, status, wealth, and security, than just about anyone not in such situations imagines possible. (The best accounts from Haiti of how people with next to nothing have patiently tried to share the little they have and support those in even worse shape than them only emphasize this disaster reality.) Crime often drops in the wake of a disaster.
The media are another matter. They tend to arrive obsessed with property (and the headlines that assaults on property can make). Media outlets often call everything looting and thereby incite hostility toward the sufferers as well as a hysterical overreaction on the part of the armed authorities. Or sometimes the journalists on the ground do a good job and the editors back in their safe offices cook up the crazy photo captions and the wrongheaded interpretations and emphases.
They also deploy the word “panic” wrongly. Panic among ordinary people in crisis is profoundly uncommon. The media will call a crowd of people running from certain death a panicking mob, even though running is the only sensible thing to do. In Haiti, they continue to report that food is being withheld from distribution for fear of “stampedes.” Do they think Haitians are cattle?
The belief that people in disaster (particularly poor and nonwhite people) are cattle or animals or just crazy and untrustworthy regularly justifies spending far too much energy and far too many resources on control — the American military calls it “security” — rather than relief. A British-accented voice-over on CNN calls people sprinting to where supplies are being dumped from a helicopter a “stampede” and adds that this delivery “risks sparking chaos.” The chaos already exists, and you can’t blame it on these people desperate for food and water. Or you can, and in doing so help convince your audience that they’re unworthy and untrustworthy.
Back to looting: of course you can consider Haiti’s dire poverty and failed institutions a long-term disaster that changes the rules of the game. There might be people who are not only interested in taking the things they need to survive in the next few days, but things they’ve never been entitled to own or things they may need next month. Technically that’s theft, but I’m not particularly surprised or distressed by it; the distressing thing is that even before the terrible quake they led lives of deprivation and desperation.
In ordinary times, minor theft is often considered a misdemeanor. No one is harmed. Unchecked, minor thefts could perhaps lead to an environment in which there were more thefts and so forth, and a good argument can be made that, in such a case, the tide needs to be stemmed. But it’s not particularly significant in a landscape of terrible suffering and mass death.
A number of radio hosts and other media personnel are still upset that people apparently took TVs after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in August 2005. Since I started thinking about, and talking to people about, disaster aftermaths I’ve heard a lot about those damned TVs. Now, which matters more to you, televisions or human life? People were dying on rooftops and in overheated attics and freeway overpasses, they were stranded in all kinds of hideous circumstances on the Gulf Coast in 2005 when the mainstream media began to obsess about looting, and the mayor of New Orleans and the governor of Louisiana made the decision to focus on protecting property, not human life.
A gang of white men on the other side of the river from New Orleans got so worked up about property crimes that they decided to take the law into their own hands and began shooting. They seem to have considered all black men criminals and thieves and shot a number of them. Some apparently died; there were bodies bloating in the September sun far from the region of the floods; one good man trying to evacuate the ruined city barely survived; and the media looked away. It took me months of nagging to even get the story covered. This vigilante gang claimed to be protecting property, though its members never demonstrated that their property was threatened. They boasted of killing black men. And they shared values with the mainstream media and the Louisiana powers that be.
Somehow, when the Bush administration subcontracted emergency services — like providing evacuation buses in Hurricane Katrina — to cronies who profited even while providing incompetent, overpriced and much delayed service at the moment of greatest urgency, we didn’t label that looting.
Or when a lot of wealthy Wall Street brokers decide to tinker with a basic human need like housing … Well, you catch my drift.
Woody Guthrie once sang that “some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen.” The guys with the six guns (or machetes or sharpened sticks) make for better photographs, and the guys with the fountain pens not only don’t end up in jail, they end up in McMansions with four-car garages and, sometimes, in elected — or appointed — office.
Learning to See in Crises
Last Christmas a priest, Father Tim Jones of York, started a ruckus in Britain when he said in a sermon that shoplifting by the desperate from chain stores might be acceptable behavior. Naturally, there was an uproar. Jones told the Associated Press: “The point I’m making is that when we shut down every socially acceptable avenue for people in need, then the only avenue left is the socially unacceptable one.”
The response focused almost entirely on why shoplifting is wrong, but the claim was also repeatedly made that it doesn’t help. In fact, food helps the hungry, a fact so bald it’s bizarre to even have to state it. The means by which it arrives is a separate matter. The focus remained on shoplifting, rather than on why there might be people so desperate in England’s green and pleasant land that shoplifting might be their only option, and whether unnecessary human suffering is itself a crime of sorts.
Right now, the point is that people in Haiti need food, and for all the publicity, the international delivery system has, so far, been a visible dud. Under such circumstances, breaking into a U.N. food warehouse — food assumedly meant for the poor of Haiti in a catastrophic moment — might not be “violence,” or “looting,” or “law-breaking.” It might be logic. It might be the most effective way of meeting a desperate need.
Why were so many people in Haiti hungry before the earthquake? Why do we have a planet that produces enough food for all and a distribution system that ensures more than a billion of us don’t have a decent share of that bounty? Those are not questions whose answers should be long delayed.
Even more urgently, we need compassion for the sufferers in Haiti and media that tell the truth about them. I’d like to propose alternative captions for those Los Angeles Times photographs as models for all future disasters:
Let’s start with the picture of the policeman hog-tying the figure whose face is so anguished: “Ignoring thousands still trapped in rubble, a policeman accosts a sufferer who took evaporated milk. No adequate food distribution exists for Haiti’s starving millions.”
And the guy with the bolt of fabric? “As with every disaster, ordinary people show extraordinary powers of improvisation, and fabrics such as these are being used to make sun shelters around Haiti.”
For the murdered policeman: “Institutional overzealousness about protecting property leads to a gratuitous murder, as often happens in crises. Meanwhile countless people remain trapped beneath crushed buildings.”
And the crowd in the rubble labeled looters? How about: “Resourceful survivors salvage the means of sustaining life from the ruins of their world.”
That one might not be totally accurate, but it’s likely to be more accurate than the existing label. And what is absolutely accurate, in Haiti right now, and on Earth always, is that human life matters more than property, that the survivors of a catastrophe deserve our compassion and our understanding of their plight, and that we live and die by words and ideas, and it matters desperately that we get them right.
At the dawn of the millennium, three catastrophes were forecast for the United States: terrorists in New York, a hurricane in New Orleans, and an earthquake in San Francisco. Rebecca Solnit lives in San Francisco with her earthquake kit and is about to make her seventh trip to New Orleans since Katrina. Her latest book, “A Paradise Built in Hell,” is a testament to human bravery and innovation during disasters.
Brian Williams 
This GeoEye-1 satellite image taken from 423 miles in space at 1037 am EST (1537 GMT) January 16, 2010, shows Port-au-Prince International Airport with multiple aircrafts, supplies and personnel on the ground. World leaders have pledged massive assistance to rebuild Haiti after the earthquake killed as many as 200,000 people, but five days into the crisis aid distribution was still random, chaotic and minimal. REUTERS/GeoEye Satellite Image/Handout (HAITI - Tags: DISASTER ENVIRONMENT) FOR EDITORIAL USE ONLY. NOT FOR SALE FOR MARKETING OR ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS(Credit: Reuters) 
Left: Haitian children line up to receive food at a food distribution site. Right: A woman defends herself as others try to take a bag she carried out of a damaged building in Port-au-Prince on Thursday. 
