The following commentary has been condensed from its original version in the Bay State Banner.

On Sept. 4, 2008, 21-year-old Joshua Pomier will have served nearly four years in a detention center [for] multiple counts of car theft and robbery.

There are two deeply troubling problems with the amount of time he has spent behind bars.

One, he has not been convicted of any of the crimes he’s charged with. He had barely turned 18 years old when he and another juvenile were arrested for the crimes in September 2004.

The even more tormenting problem is not Pomier’s guilt or innocence, but the absurdly long length of time that he has been jailed awaiting disposition — any disposition — of the charges leveled against him.

During that time, he has been relentlessly pressured to accept a plea bargain that will require him to serve a lengthy prison sentence. Pomier has refused and continues to protest his innocence.

Pomier is African American, and his dragged-out incarceration without being convicted of anything is not unusual.

In fact, he’s a near-textbook example of how thousands of mostly black and Latino young adults and juveniles languish for months, even years, in America’s jails with high or no bail, receive shoddy or nonexistent legal counsel, and are browbeaten by harried, overworked and often indifferent public defenders and prosecutors to accept deals.

The Coalition for Juvenile Justice estimates that on any given day, nearly 30,000 youth between the ages of 14 and 18 are locked down in juvenile detention centers for interminably long periods awaiting disposition of their cases.

The young adult defendants are nearly always faced with excessively high bail, and for juveniles, no bail. Juveniles are considered wards of the court, and pre-trial release is solely at the discretion of the judge.

In one study, the Sentencing Project found that blacks on average were held for a year or more without any action on their case.

A San Francisco study of 1,500 high-risk youth found that youths placed in alternative-to-detention programs had a far lower recidivism rate than youth who remained incarcerated while awaiting sentencing.

The United Nations Human Rights Committee, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other international legal and human rights groups have fiercely condemned excessive pre-trial imprisonment in the United States and other countries.

They have labeled it a gross violation of civil liberties. It also mocks the U.S. Constitution’s precept of a defendant’s right to a speedy trial.

The outrage and condemnation of international legal and human rights bodies, and the efforts by some states at reforms in the way defendants awaiting disposition of their cases are handled, is welcome.

However, it won’t do much to ease the anxiety of Pomier’s family. They have waited for nearly four years to find out his legal fate. Unfortunately, there’s no sign that their wait will end any time soon.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is a syndicated columnist, author, political analyst and social issues commentator.

Source: BayStateBanner.com [1]

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