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On July 4, 1992, one of my heroes and inspirations, Thurgood Marshall, gave a speech that deeply resonates today. “We cannot play ostrich,” he said. “Democracy just cannot flourish amid fear. Liberty cannot bloom amid hate. Justice cannot take root amid rage. America must get to work.… We must dissent from the indifference. We must dissent from the apathy. We must dissent from the fear, the hatred, and the mistrust.”
“Why would I applaud you for something you were supposed to do?” she would admonish if I tried to fish for compliments. And if I came home to report the latest drama in search of a sympathetic ear, my mother would have none of it. Her first reaction would be “Well, what did you do?” In retrospect, I see that she was trying to teach me that I had power and agency. Fair enough, but it still drove me crazy.
“Fight systems in a way that causes them to be fairer, and don’t be limited by what has always been.”
America has a deep and dark history of people using the power of the prosecutor as an instrument of injustice.
For too long, we’d been told there were only two options: to be either tough on crime or soft on crime—an oversimplification that ignored the realities of public safety. You can want the police to stop crime in your neighborhood and also want them to stop using excessive force. You can want them to hunt down a killer on your streets and also want them to stop using racial profiling. You can believe in the need for consequence and accountability, especially for serious criminals, and also oppose unjust incarceration. I believed it was essential to weave all these varied strands together.
The reason we have public offices of prosecution in America is that, in our country, a crime against any of us is considered a crime against all of us. Almost by definition, our criminal justice system involves matters in which the powerful have harmed the less powerful, and we do not expect the weaker party to secure justice alone; we make it a collective endeavor. That’s why prosecutors don’t represent the victim; they represent “the people”—society at large.
when it comes to the things that matter most, we have so much more in common than what separates us.
It is to recognize that not everyone needs punishment, that what many need, quite plainly, is help.
We also need to stop treating drug addiction like a public safety crisis instead of what it is: a public health crisis.
A patriot is not someone who condones the conduct of our country, whatever it does; it is someone who fights every day for the ideals of the country, whatever it takes.
Years from now, our children and our grandchildren will look up and lock eyes with us. They will ask us where we were when the stakes were so high. They will ask us what it was like. I don’t want us to just tell them how we felt. I want us to tell them what we did.
