Caller.com - Congressman Calls for Greater Transparency in Justice System

News Article

By Krista M. Torralva

The world may not always be fair but God is always faithful, was Texas congressman Al Green's message at the 45th Annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Freedom Fund Banquet on Saturday night.

About 600 people filled an American Bank Center ballroom for the event, hosted by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Corpus Christi chapter.

A religious man who grew up with a Methodist minister grandfather and is Baptist now, Green spoke about faith and social issues including minimum wage, equal pay, immigration and transparency in the criminal justice system.

Green, D-Houston, is sponsoring legislation called the Transparency in Policing Act that would use federal funds to arm law enforcement officers with body cameras.

"It really protects the officers because when you have the empirical evidence of what occurred you eliminate a lot of speculation of what the facts are," he told the Caller-Times before the banquet.

Police in Houston, the largest city in Green's district, are already using body cameras, he said. The Corpus Christi Police Department received about 80 body cameras last year as part of a grant District Attorney Mark Skurka applied for.

Green spoke about his belief in having a greater degree of transparency in the criminal justice system. Because he's seen a "long list" of cases with decisions or verdicts that mystified a large portion of the community, including the Eric Garner case last year, he said he wishes the system included a public examining trial that lays out all the evidence and testimony a grand jury gets to see.

Garner died last year after a New York City police officer held him in a chokehold. A grand jury in December declined to indict the officer.

"When you don't get to see any of the testimony ..... then you leave people looking at the system with some degree of "I'm not sure that this is working.' The last thing that we want is for our system to be perceived as one that places anyone above the law or anyone beneath the law," Green said.

Green, a former NAACP chapter president, was invited to speak this year because his vision is in line with the NAACP's mission, chapter president Terry Mills said.

"He believes in equality, fairness and justice for all," Mills said.

So much so, Green hopes the country's next president is a woman -- no matter her political affiliation.

"Whoever she happens to be ... even if she is a libertarian, republican, conservative, liberal," Green said. "It will mean something to little girls, who won't be Republicans or Democrats in school, to know that it really is true that anybody can be president of the United States of America and that is not a position for men only."

Source