jg152015@ohio.edu
"There’s not enough money in the world to compensate one minute of my life.”
These are the words Kwame Ajamu left the audience with as he wrapped up his interview during the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism's "90 minutes" series this past Wednesday night.
Ajamu is one of the hundreds and even thousands of people wrongly accused and sentenced to prison for committing some sort of crime. There have currently been 2,295 exonerations and more than a cumulative 20,265 years lost since 1989 alone, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.
For these men and women, how do we make up for the years they've lost and the memories they'll never get back? "We were robbed,'' Ajamu said in an interview with the Plain Dealer. "There will be no offspring when I die. When my brother passes away, that is it. We don't have children. There will never be another Ronnie Bridgeman."
Ajamu and his two "cohorts" were convicted under the false eye-witness testimony of 13-year-old Eddie Vernon. The only reason the three were ever exonerated was because Vernon was so torn up inside about his actions all those year ago. "I wanted to trade places because I said, 'It should be me instead of them,'" said Vernon in an interview with National Public Radio. "As I grew up, I was depressed, suicidal. It ate me up so much inside, man."
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| Courtesy of Aizman Law Firm |
Ohio. Murder. Official misconduct.
These are the same factors that played against Ajamu in 1975 when he was arrested.
Seventy-four percent.
That's the percentage of black men in the exact same situation as Ajamu that end up being exonerated after "new evidence" arises.
Vernon, a young boy at the time, was coerced by police into falsely testifying against Ajamu and the others. While we love that our police forces do their jobs, where do we draw the line? And how do we make it up to those who've taken the fall for unfortunately poor police work?
The short, sad answer is this: we can't.
No amount of money, no number of "I'm so sorry"s and no heartfelt news story can replace the memories the wrongly incarcerated miss during their years behind bars. At the interview, Ajamu recalled the first time he saw his brother after they both were freed, and broke down in tears.
He had never seen his own brother with hair on his face.
Twenty-eight years Ajamu was robbed of his life. For nothing. For no reason other than the police needed a killer and he and his buddies fit the bill.
False incarceration is a deeply troubling issue in today's society. A man can be favored or penalized based solely on the color of his skin. It all stems from a deep stereotype most of us don't even realize we have. But we as the media can begin to help.
A lot of stereotypes we learn are from the things we read in the paper and hear on the news. But a man is a man first and foremost -- all other information about him is secondary. If we can be more careful with our actions, other fields can as well.
There's nothing in the world that can replace the time we are given on this earth -- use it wisely.
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