The U.S. justice system displays its inherent racism and disregard for victims of domestic violence in the case of Marissa Alexander
On January 27th, Marissa Alexander is expected to finally leave jail after what many have decried as a wrongful conviction and commitment. On August 1st of 2010, Alexander fired what she has called a warning shot, to protect herself against her abusive husband, nine days after she had given birth to a premature daughter. Two of his children were in the house at the time. Supporters say this shot saved her life after a violent struggle escalated to verbal threats that he was going to kill her, and she could not get out of the locked garage. Alexander drew a gun out of her car that she was licensed to carry and use.
Domestic violence and gun laws have been trending topics on social media in the U.S. over the course of the past year, particularly with regard to questions of victim-blaming, as in the case of Janay Palmer and Ray Rice, and with regard to Florida’s controversial Stand Your Ground law, which has been linked to the violent shooting deaths of Trayvon Martin in 2012, and Jordan Davis in 2013. Stand Your Ground is meant to provide immunity to those who resort to deadly force in self-defence. Historically, this had to do with protecting oneself and one’s home and property from intruders, deriving from something called the castle doctrine. Stand Your Ground has been expanded in certain states to include self-defence when one feels one’s life is threatened, and was thus cited in the non-indictment of George Zimmerman in the violent shooting death of Trayvon Martin. Florida woman Marissa Alexander’s protracted legal struggle – which combines both of these controversial topics – reveals an unfortunate perpetuation of victim-blaming and bias against women and people of colour in the U.S. justice system, effectively silencing and invisibilising victims of domestic violence; all the more readily if she is a black woman.
First convicted in 2011, Alexander has now spent nearly three years behind bars. Initially sentenced to 20 years, she was told to expect 60 years if found guilty again at a retrial scheduled for December 1st at the hands of notoriously harsh State Prosecutor Angela Corey. The conditions of Alexander’s pending release constitute quite the pyrrhic victory in a black woman’s battle for life and legitimacy: she is now an averred criminal, having accepted a plea bargain on November 24th, pleading guilty to three charges of aggravated assault. By the time of her release, Alexander will have completed the plea deal’s concomitant three-year prison sentence, and will be required to spend two more years under house arrest. These are the facts of the outcome from the case of a woman who fired a warning shot because she felt that her life was in danger, in a state where others have found protection under Stand Your Ground law for killing innocent youth because they felt that their life was in danger. Alexander was compelled to accept criminal charges in order to once again save her life – this time, from being spent in prison. Her status as a credible and legitimate citizen-subject, already systematically psychologically undermined in the context of an abusive intimate relationship, has met with further, civic degradation at the hands of the justice system. One cannot help but wonder here whether this is a case of Alexander’s ventriloquising for the justice system what she has always been in its eyes, as a black woman: unruly, criminal, not to be trusted?
In a talk last month, Professor Angela Davis addressed the importance of “attending to the circuits that lead from the intimate to the institutional, from the public to the private, and from the personal to the political.” The travesty of justice in Marissa Alexander’s case – a victim of domestic violence who has been apprehended and incarcerated for defending herself – points to a not-so-subtle collusion between intimate and state violence. These are, if you will, different levels of “the domestic” – an imagined space of protection and nurturing of citizen-life for the continued growth of the family and, by extension, the nation. In resonance with the logic of awareness-raising efforts of #blacklivesmatter campaigns, Alexander’s case makes evident that not all lives are in fact counted as equal, credible or legitimate. It is also, sadly, not at all new.
Alexander was initially refused immunity under Stand Your Ground. Last year, the law underwent an amendment said to be inspired by her case, and yet she was again denied immunity. The controversial amendment to include warning shots, mediated by smug and patronising older white men in power, publicly pitted the mothers of Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis against Marissa Alexander. Riding off of false sympathy for Alexander, this turn of events only served to publicly fraction members of a community who might otherwise be a source of solidarity and support for one another. The degradation of the collective support systems of citizens by agents of the state mirrors a methodical isolation of the victimised counterpart in intimate partner violence, and indicates a palpable continuity between private and public violence, as suggested by Professor Davis.
Rhetoric of violence and invalidation: abuse, dismissal
The ways in which Alexander’s domestic violence case has been spoken and written about enacts a routine – and commonplace – dismissal and diminishment of the deeply harmful and dangerous nature of domestic violence: “domestic dispute” is often used by the media as a phrase to describe the events of the day that she fired the shot in self-defence. The euphemistic use of “dispute” is wholly inappropriate and inaccurate in any discussion of domestic violence, and its codified use only serves to further exculpate a guilty system from complicity in ignoring and passing over such deeply damaging and fatal cycles of violence. Additionally, a critical piece in the judge’s conviction of Alexander was a claim that she was acting out of “anger” rather than “fear.” Just as with the Janay Palmer and Ray Rice incident, the media and public has been eager to blame the victim, citing both women as “violent”, calling the couple – in both instances – a “violent couple,” and invalidating Alexander and Palmer’s victimhood by pointing out aggressive acts that the women committed in self-defence.
At the end of the day, in taking her life into her own hands, out of those of her abusive ex-husband, Marissa Alexander has given over more than five years of her life to state power. This begs the following question: where does a battered woman’s agency lie, when she has stood up against her abuser? We are immediately prompted to consider what threat, exactly, the black woman fighting for her life and dignity may signify? Or, more specifically, as Professor Davis put it at the end of her talk, “what is so threatening about a black woman in the southern United States who attempts to defend herself from what is called domestic violence?”
Image from: http://www.bet.com/news/national/2014/06/10/marissa-alexander-back-in-court-new-trial-postponed-to-december.html