The Opportunity Agenda joined AARP, ACLU, The Lawyers’ Committee For Civil Rights Under Law and the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund in filing briefs with the court. (The Equal Justice Society signed on to the Opportunity Agenda brief.) Twelve state attorneys general also filed briefs in favor of fair housing law enforcement.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments in this case on February 29.

What’s at stake in Magner is the obligation of cities and towns to protect equal opportunity in housing. That responsibility includes avoiding unnecessary policies that discriminate in practice, as well as those that are intentionally discriminatory.

For more than 40 years, our courts have said that the Fair Housing Act prohibits both old school bigotry in housing, and policies that have the unnecessary effect of excluding qualified people based on their race, disability, or other factors. In Magner, the Supreme Court will be deciding whether that longstanding, commonsense interpretation will continue, or whether only intentional discrimination can ever violate the Fair Housing Act.

The plaintiffs in the case are building owners in St. Paul, Minn., who rent their properties to working class people, including many African Americans. They say that the city is trying to push them and other rental owners out of town, in favor of owner-occupied housing, with the practical effect of excluding many African Americans from any housing in the city. According to the property owners, the city is using excessive and often false code enforcement against these owners, but leaving alone owners who live in their homes.

The plaintiffs challenged the City of St. Paul’s policy in federal court under the Fair Housing Act. The Act, part of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, prohibits discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of dwellings, based on race, color, national origin, religion, sex, familial status and disability.

Passage of the Fair Housing Act was not easy. From 1966 to 1967, Congress was unable to garner a strong enough majority for its passage. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was closely associated with the fair housing legislation since the 1966 open housing marches in Chicago. When Dr. King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, President Johnson urged Congress to pass the fair housing act as a tribute to Dr. King.

During this same time period, the deaths of our soldiers in Vietnam fell heaviest upon young, poor African Americans and Hispanics. The families of these soldiers could not purchase or rent homes in certain residential developments on account of their race or national origin. Senators Edward Brooke and Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts argued strongly for the passage of this legislation. In particular, Senator Brooke, the first African American ever to be elected to the Senate by popular vote, spoke personally of his return from World War II and his inability to provide a home of his choice for his new family because of his race.

Despite the progress we’ve made as a nation more than four decades after passage of the Fair Housing Act, significant obstacles to equal opportunity still exist, particularly when it comes to housing and homeownership. There are still some real estate agents, landlords, and others who practice intentional discrimination against people of color, families with children, people with disabilities, and other Americans.

But more often these days, local governments and real estate corporations engage in unjustified and unnecessary practices with the practical effect of discriminating against well-qualified Americans. Some cities and towns, for example, prohibit the building of smaller homes or apartments that working people could afford, which in many places excludes most people of color. That means certain Americans are unfairly and unnecessarily cut off from opportunities like quality schools, jobs, and business possibilities.

That’s bad for all of us, and the Supreme Court should reaffirm that the law forbids it by ruling in favor of the plaintiffs in Magner.

Sources: The Opportunity Agenda, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development

Eva authored this guest post on Jan. 11 for the SAFE California Campaign site.

My fiancé, Steve Henry, was murdered in Kingston, Jamaica, on November 25, 1997. As bizarre as this may sound, one of the thoughts I had as the initial shock wore off, was “Well, am I still against the death penalty?” My answer then and now is a resounding “YES”. The death penalty is wrong.

I will be thinking of Steve this weekend as Rev. Jesse Jackson, the California NAACP, and civil rights leaders throughout the state come together to honor Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. We are all supporting the SAFE California campaign to end death sentences. Dr. King once said, “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is: ‘What are you doing for others?’” I plan to honor Steve’s memory and Dr. King’s passionate commitment to justice.

Will you join us to honor justice and Dr. King?

The SAFE California campaign is sponsored by a broad coalition of justice organizations who are all joined in the commitment to replace the death penalty to protect the innocent, save our very limited state resources, and improve safety in our communities. SAFE is working hard to get the hundreds of thousands of signatures needed to qualify the “Savings, Accountability, and Full Enforcement for California Act” ballot initiative in time for the November 2012 election.

I am proud to say that my organization, Equal Justice Society, sits on the SAFE California Campaign Steering Committee. We at Equal Justice Society, like Dr. King and his wife Coretta Scott King, have always been opposed to the death penalty and advocated for an end to this risky and costly punishment. I am also proud to say that many of the dedicated members of Equal Justice Society will be joining the thousands of volunteers statewide who are ready to commemorate Dr. King’s leadership by joining this historic movement over MLK weekend.

Coretta Scott King declared, “As one whose husband and mother-in-law have died the victims of murder assassination, I stand firmly and unequivocally opposed to the death penalty for those convicted of capital offenses.” I know how difficult that statement is to make and I agree wholeheartedly.

Please join me to honor the King family and all victims of senseless violence by making a commitment to justice this coming weekend.

In peace,
Eva Paterson

- Written by Eva Paterson, President and Co-Founder of the Equal Justice Society and guest blogger for the SAFE California Campaign

The San Francisco Chronicle on Jan. 1 profiled EJS President Eva Paterson in a special section on local “Change Makers.” James Bell, Nikki Fortunato Bas, Malkia Cyril and Tim Silard were also profiled. Read the intro to the section and Eva’s profile.

Texas Death Row exoneree, Mr. Anthony Graves, testified that “the only sound I heard for four years was the sound of my own voice.” Mr. Graves used his voice last week to educate the Bay Area legal community on the life-changing ramifications of a justice system that continues to negligently overlook implicit and explicit racism. More than 300 friends and allies heard him speak at our Gala last week.

In McCleskey v Kemp, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed that without evidence of conscious, deliberate bias by law officials, evidence of racial sentencing disparities in the death penalty was “an inevitable part of our criminal justice system.” Mr. Graves’s harrowing testimony of a wrongful murder conviction, and 18 years spent in Texas’s prisons and Death Row, affirmed that the consequences of McCleskey are real.

This summer, attorneys from the Equal Justice Society spent time in the South working with key litigation allies on our long-term strategy to reclaim the protections of the Fourteenth Amendment. At the end of our travels, we concluded that in addition to litigation, finding ways to help people understand that bias is alive and well in all our psyches – as well as working on ways that we can de-bias ourselves and our institutions – is critical to our efforts. In 2012, EJS will partner with an esteemed legal bias expert to educate attorneys and judges on how implicit bias affects their decision-making processes.

In addition to our Southern sojourns, we also continued litigation in Associated General Contractors of America v. Caltrans currently at the Ninth Circuit, strengthened the California Coalition for Civil Rights, wrote and signed on to more than half a dozen amicus briefs, and published an article, “Litigating Implicit Bias,” in the September/October issue of Race and Poverty. Your support enabled us to make great strides.

In 2012, EJS is considering filing an amicus brief at the U.S. Supreme Court in a fair housing case, Magner v. Gallagher, will present our litigation strategy at Yale Law School, and develop a series of bias workshops across the nation.

To fulfill our goals, we are planning to add an additional member to our Legal Department. Will you help us?

If you donate by December 31, 2011, your gift will be doubled thanks to a generous Matching Gift Challenge. Please renew your support as a sign of solidarity.

Stories like Mr. Graves’ are infuriating – but they also set fire to our courage to keep moving our strategy forward.

Onward and Upward!

Eva Paterson
President, Equal Justice Society

P.S. Don’t forget! As a result of our $100,000 Matching Gift Challenge, if you give online or mail a check to our offices by December 31st, your gift will be doubled. For example, if you donate $100 now, your gift will be matched by an additional $100 for a total of $200. Now, more than ever, is the time to invest in EJS’s legal strategy.

Anthony Graves, father of three and an African American man with no violent past, was on death row in Texas for more than a decade despite his innocence before being exonerated. Now, Anthony spends his time speaking out about the injustice of the death penalty. He is headlining a panel hosted by the Equal Justice Society on December 7, exploring how we can understand the death penalty in the context of modern-day racism in America. The panel also highlights the need to develop a cohesive legal strategy to reclaim the 14th Amendment as a tool to combat modern-day racism. We talked with Anthony about his long fight for freedom and his work to replace the death penalty with life without parole to eliminate the grave risk of executing innocent people.

Give us a brief background on your case.
In 1992, there was a crime in a little small town known as Somerville, Texas. There were six victims; four of them were children, one was a teenager, and one was a grandmother. They were shot, stabbed and bludgeoned to death, and then the house was set on fire. The guy that was thought to be a person of interest in the case was the father of one of the children. The police interrogated this man for hours, and then they told him that if he gave them someone’s name, they would let him go. He called out my name, not thinking that they were going to arrest me, because he was giving them a wild story. Well, I was arrested and I ended up on death row for 18 years for a crime I did not commit. Even after my case was overturned by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals for egregious prosecutorial misconduct, I ended up staying at the local county jail for four more years, in isolation, because they refused to admit they made a mistake. Several prosecutors were assigned by the county to retry my case, and for one reason or another they got off the case. The last prosecutor, Kelly Siegler, was known as a tough-as-nails prosecutor because she had already put 19 men on death row. She came in and, for the first time in 18 years, my case was investigated. What she found out was very shocking to her, and she called it the criminal justice system’s worst nightmare. She went to the judge and asked the judge to sign the dismissal order because I was innocent.

What kept you fighting for 18 years? What kept you from giving up?
Living on death row was hell, because you had no control over your life. You had absolutely no say so about what you could do throughout the day. Your life was controlled by guards, 18- or 19-year-old guards fresh out of high school, who had the right to disrespect you and treat you as less than the man that you were. And you had conditions that were so inhumane that guys were giving up their appeals, committing suicide, attempting to commit suicide or going totally insane. That still is going on today on Texas Death Row. What kept me strong was that I knew I was innocent. I was naïve enough to believe that you just can’t take a man from his home for a crime that took place in another town that he wasn’t even in, falsely convict him, and then murder him. I refused to believe we had a criminal justice system like that even though I was there long enough to witness Texas executing more than 300 men. But, because I didn’t want to give up, I allowed my naiveté to keep me strong. In the meantime, they gave me two execution dates – which makes it clear to me that Texas is executing innocent people. How do I know? They tried to execute me twice for a crime I did not commit.

Three hundred people executed over 12 and half years?
Texas was breaking execution records set by Texas. They were competing with themselves to break their own records. We would be naïve to believe they never got it wrong. I used to cry about it a lot at night, and I promised myself that when I got out of prison, not only was I going to work to help the guys I left behind, I was also going to tell the rest of the world what was happening on death row. I hope and pray that I am effective enough and clear enough about how the death penalty is totally inhumane, and how inhumane it makes us look. We are the only nation, the only democratic nation, acting like a third world country when it comes to our criminal justice system. We are supposed to be the nation that leads the world. Yet, we have created a system that threatens the life of innocent people. As of today, 139 people have been exonerated from death in the United States. And, yet, we are still killing. How many did we get wrong?

Would you still call yourself “naïve” about how justice in America is carried out?
I am no longer naïve. Our criminal justice system needs to be reformed. I say to the American people, where is the outrage? It could be your son or your daughter or your father or your mother next. Do not think it can’t happen to you, because it happened to me. We have a death penalty system that is killing innocent people, not just in the state of Texas but also in other states that have the death penalty. Anyone — anyone — would be naïve to believe otherwise. It is sad to me that there is no real outrage about it, not just from people on the street but from those we vote in to office to protect and serve us.

How is life now that you are free?
I am trying to rebuild it. It is so different from the life I had before. I am on a mission to alert the American people that our criminal justice system has turned against us. They are killing us for crimes we did not commit. We need to wake up and say: No, this is not the system that we want. Now, I spend every moment of my life traveling and educating people about the injustice of the death penalty and telling people what happened to me. Sharing my story, sharing my insight. I work for a nonprofit organization that represents people on death row, and I also travel around the world to educate people. I go anywhere to talk to anyone who is willing to hear my story. My life is totally dedicated to exposing the injustice of the death penalty. The guys I left behind, some of them are innocent, some of them are mentally ill, and Texas still wants to murder them for a crime they may or may not have committed. Don’t believe me? Ask the 139 others who have walked off death row in the United States. Ask their families and their mothers. I could be doing a lot of other things with my life. Texas compensated me for this wrongful conviction. But I am here talking about the death penalty and how wrong it is simply because I know it’s true. And I just can’t stand by without telling people what I know.

Do you think the death penalty should be replaced with life without parole?
One innocent life is one too many to waste, so therefore we should not be tinkering with the death penalty. America needs to know that we are wasting a lot of money murdering precious life. We have a system that has run amok, and we are all in the way. We are spending more money to execute one person than we are to keep that person in prison for the rest of his or her life.

Thank you for sharing your story with us. What compels you to keep telling it?
I feel like if I stop, someone else is going to be murdered who is probably innocent. Knowing that, I have to keep telling my story until I can ensure that no one innocent can be executed. That drives me to tell my story, when- and wherever I can.

How can people help?
Whoever has whatever platform out there, allow me a few minutes of your time to get on your platform and share my story. It will be a tremendous help to righting this injustice. Please also consider supporting the nonprofit where I work, the Texas Defender Service.