225. Power struggles

Christopher Paul Moore's Fighting for America: Black Soldiers - The Unsung Heroes of World War II is mostly a collection of anecdotes drawn from interviews, medal citations, newspaper accounts and battlefield reports.  It gives a ground-level view of the war, entirely unlike conventional histories that attribute every military action to the commanders.

One story describes the experience of the 827th tank destroyer battalion, which destroyed 11 German tanks one day and 4 the next, and was soon afterward relegated to noncombat duties at the instigation of its own white officers, some of whom had actually fought with their men. 

Pfc. Charles Branson, an assistant gunner on one of these Hellcat Tank Destroyers, told Moore:

"Any white unit that accomplished what we did against the Nazis would have been commended generously.  They [the white officers] just had to be in charge," said Branson.

"I don't think some would have minded losing the war outright, just so they could puff up their chests.  They just had to be in charge."

I don't buy that the racist officers wouldn't have minded losing the war.  Rather, I think, the white officers wanted to win the war in the long term, but in the short term they were mainly interested in puffing out their chests and being in charge.

In the war, there was more than one struggle going on.  At a virtually abstract level, there was the Allies against the Axis powers.  On the ground there were Allied soldiers against Axis soldiers.  And, as Coppola's Patton dramatized, there were also struggles between jodhpur-wearing generals and English military celebrities who got better press coverage. 

Within each national Army, there were other power struggles. 

In any Army, the relationship between officers and enlisted men is always based centrally on power, though one hopes it also includes respect, admiration, loyalty, dedication to a common goal, etc.  Branson, I'm sure, is right that some white officers of Black troops were overly focused on the immediate power struggle, because (1) some people are just like that, as everyone who's ever worked in an office knows; and (2) the type of dominance racist whites wanted over Blacks was much more complicated (and complete) than a soldier's obedience. 

When I read - or, rather, listened to, in the excellent Recorded Books version - Moore's Fighting for America, the analogy suggested itself.  When courts consider a criminal case such as the quadruple murder described in post 224, many adversarial relationships based on power are at issue, not just that between prosecution and defense.

 At the most fundamental level - and, to my mind, by far the most significant level - there was the power relationship between Ealy and his four victims.   But it makes people uncomfortable to think about the strangulation of a pregnant woman, two teenage girls, and the rape and strangulation of a 3-year-old boy.

Luckily, there are abstractions galore to think about instead. There's what the Supreme Court melodramatically termed "the unceasing contest between personal liberty and government oppression."   Of course, the attentions of the police can indeed be oppressive.  One only needs to remember what the "po" in Gestapo means.  But in concrete terms, the Court was referring to the "unceasing contest" between  cops and robbers.  How much power should the cops have in that contest? - a question that gets more difficult when you phrase it the other way around: How much power should the robbers have?

But of course the criminal justice system doesn't end with the arrest.  There's the trial, and the appeal, and the habeas corpus.  Murder cases routinely go on for years, even decades.  At every step of the way, there's a new set of power relationships.  There is perhaps only one institution in American life as rigidly, unforgivingly hierarchical as the military, and that's the judiciary.  (Like this, this and this, too.)

The Ealy case enacts the power relationship between courts, of course - the appeals court overturned the trial court.  Big brother beat up little brother.  Many murder cases (though not Ealy's) then go on to illustrate the power relationship between intermediate appellate courts and state supreme courts, and between state supreme courts and the U.S. Supreme Court, and between state supreme courts and federal habeas corpus courts, and so on.  At each step of the way, there's another power relationship that has nothing to do with the crime.

The Ealy case also illustrates yet another power relationship: that between branches of government.  In Ealy's case, the judicial branch condemned - in fact, nullified - the actions of the executive branch, and forbade the enforcement of the laws against murder enacted by the Illinois legislative branch.  The judiciary was enforcing its supremacy over the other branches. 

The rhetoric of judicial opinions traditionally acknowledges only one of the many power relationships involved in judges' decisions.  The fourth amendment, courts never tire of telling us, requires them to weigh competing interests, in order to achieve "a balance between the public interest and the individual's right to personal security free from arbitrary interference by law officers."  Cops and robbers.

But fourth amendment decisions about the legality of an arrest also - automatically and unavoidably - require "balancing" (that is, choosing) between the exercise of power by the police over criminals and the exercise of power by the courts over the police.

Once it's understood that not just one but two power relationships are directly on the line, decisions such as that of the Illinois Appellate Court in James Ealy's case become much easier to understand.  It's not that the judges were on Ealy's side.   They were on their own side.  What was at issue wasn't what Ealy did to the Parkers, but who was going to be in charge as between three judges and a bunch of ill-educated blue collar types who say "dis" for "this."

In the long term, no doubt, the judges the Appellate Court wanted the police to defeat the murderers.  But in the short term, they wanted to puff up their chests.  They just had to be in charge.