The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

by Michelle Alexander

plainly discriminatory. Adolph Lyons’s attempt to ban the use of lethal chokeholds by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) is a good example. Lyons, a twenty-four-year-old black man, was driving his car in Los Angeles one morning when he was pulled over by four police officers for a burned-out taillight. With guns drawn, police ordered Lyons out of his car. He obeyed. The officers told him to face the car, spread his legs, and put his hands on his head. Again, Lyons did as he was told. After the officers completed a pat-down, Lyons dropped his hands, prompting an officer to slam Lyons’s hands back on his head. When Lyons complained that the car keys he was holding were causing him pain, the officer forced Lyons into a chokehold. He lost consciousness and collapsed. When he awoke, “he was spitting up blood and dirt, had urinated and defecated, and had suffered permanent damage to his larynx.”91 The officers issued a traffic ticket for the burned-out taillight and released him. Lyons sued the City of Los Angeles for violation of his constitutional rights and sought, as a remedy, a ban against future use of the chokeholds. By the time his case reached the Supreme Court, sixteen people had been killed by police use of the chokehold, twelve of them black men. The Supreme Court dismissed the case, however, ruling that Lyons lacked “standing” to seek an injunction against the deadly practice. In order to have standing, the Court reasoned, Lyons would have to show that he was ...