Good afternoon! We are Chicago’s radical legal community of color. We are lawyers, legal workers, and law students of color. We know all too well that the legal system is NOT broken – in fact, it is doing exactly what it is designed to do: attempt to control, devalue, and break our communities of color and all other marginalized communities – women, immigrants, the disability community, the queer, trans, intersex and HIV positive communities, and religious minorities — to name a few.
We know we are complicit in the legal system through our roles as attorneys, law students, and legal workers, and we promise – we VOW to use our privilege to hold the legal system accountable for its crimes against the black community and other marginalized communities. . We want the public to know that the radical legal community of color supports the people, and supports blacklivesmatter and reclaimMLKchi.
We therefore proclaim a People’s Indictment on the United States of America, and we charge the United States with committing serious crimes against our communities. We are here to demand reparations!
Specifically, we call for reparations to police torture survivors in Chicago!
We will now read some of the crimes committed by the United States of America and the legal system against our community!
We Indict The System for Offenses against native people
For committing genocide against the indigenous people of this land.
For building systems to legitimate stealing the land of the few indigenous people who survived the genocide.
For the continued occupation of Native American land.
For trying to erase Native American people, their history, and their culture.
We Indict The System for Offenses against black people
For building the nation on the backs of enslaved ancestors.
For always finding ways to legitimate the murder, enslavement, and abuse of people of color at the hands of the white and wealthy.
For the lack of accountability for the murder of black people
For the racist crack/cocaine disparity.
For mandatory minimums.
For the school-to-prison pipeline criminalizing our black youth.
For the unchecked power of the police.
For the prison industrial complex trapping people in jail, not for crimes committed, but due to poverty and the inability to pay bond.
For using the courts to perpetuate class divisions.
For using the courts to maintain the positions of the white and wealthy.
For the system which traps people into pleas for crimes never committed.
For disparities in criminal enforcement of laws depending on the color of one’s skin.
For continuing slavery through the criminal “justice” system.
For the systematic cover-up and torture of black men at the hands of the Chicago Police Department under Jon Burge
For segregating black people and denying them access to quality education, health care, and housing
For the mass incarceration of of black people.
For the militarization of the police and over-policing of our communities.
We Indict The System for Offenses against women
For systematically denying women the right to equality and justice.
For denying women their personhood.
We Indict The System for Offenses against queer/trans communities
for criminalizing trans women for simply walking while trans
for enforcing a gender binary that harms queer, trans, and intersex communities
for policing gender
for, in many places, mandating curriculum that explicitly devalues and demonizes queer, trans, and intersex identities
We Indict The System for Offenses against Religious minorities
For using fear to control the people.
For surveying, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting people’s movements.
For the racist special registration program post-9/11.
For the imprisonment of innocent men for 13 years at Guantanamo Bay.
For hypocritical human rights war mongering.
For the invented terrorist plots that entrap troubled youth touted as crime stopping victories.
For institutionalized islamophobia.
We Indict The System for Offenses against the poor
For allowing the government, courts, politicians to be bought by the highest bidder.
For denying the people their voice in favor of corporate personhood.
For governing for corporations and not people.
For criminalizing economic refugees.
For protecting those who own over those who work.
For choosing war to further the wealth of the wealthy while pillaging and murdering the poor.
For always serving the dominant economic interests over the people’s interests.
We Indict The System for Offenses against all people of color, at home and abroad
For furthering racism to support the economic system.
For stealing nearly half of Mexico.
For choosing war to avoid people’s rebellion.
For stealing the Philippines, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Guam + others
For going to war for money.
For criminalizing dissent.
For unjustly interning people of Japanese descent.
For manipulating how history is remembered.
For countless atrocities against innocent people in too many wars.
For lying and covering up the truth about atrocities committed by Americans in war.
For jailing and murdering the people’s leaders.
For sacrificing the working class in unjust wars.
For overthrowing or attempting to overthrow innumerable foreign governments around the world
For conducting covert operations throughout the world that lead to the disappearance, incarceration, and murder of people of color
For legalizing indentured servitude through the bracero program and temporary worker programs.
For creating economic sanctions that led to millions of deaths.
For supporting Israel’s occupation of Palestine.
For occupying too many lands and people, trying to make all in the likeness and in the service of the U.S.A.
For property seizures which enrich the rich.
For racist immigration policies.
For the murder of our brothers and sisters.
For the wars fought in our name sold to the people with lies.
For the mass surveillance of our people.
For unending colonialism and imperialism
For decades of red-lining, gentrification, other racist housing policies that ensured Chicago would remain one of the most segregated cities in this country
For systematically devaluing people of color.
We Indict The System for Offenses against the disability community
for criminalizing HIV positive folks for simply living their lives
for failing to provide adequate mental health services for all, but especially the poor
for failing to protect disabled youth
Judge
As the people’s judge, Judge Torres, I find the United States guilty of all accused crimes!
We demand reparations against communities of color, against all marginalized communities!
