Black Woman Protesting Police Brutality Charged With Lynching in California

What does it mean to lynch somebody? Do you know? Even if you couldn’t come up with an airtight legal definition, it’s likely that you know what that crime is. It involves an extrajudicial punishment, most typically an execution. Sometimes people who were lynched were kidnapped from their homes. Other times, they were taken from jails or out of the hands of police and sheriff’s deputies. And then they were hanged or shot full of holes or burned. Or sometimes hanged, shot full of holes and burned.

In this Sunday, Dec. 7, 2014 photo provided by Alexander Tu, a masked protester holds up the U.S. flag during a demonstration against police killings in Missouri and New York and stands by burning dumpsters in Berkeley, Calif. The next month at a protest in Sacramento, police say Maile Hampton responded inappropriately when police detained her friend. Hampton has been charged with lynching. (AP Photo/Alexander Tu) (AP photo / Alexander Tu)

All of the above might sound a bit elementary, but it’s necessary to go over the definition because, clearly, the state of California doesn’t seem to understand what lynching is, or what people should be charged with that crime. The Guardian, a British newspaper, has just published a story about Maile Hampton, a black California woman who, while protesting police brutality in Sacramento in January was charged with lynching a comrade she may have been trying to pull away from the police.

Yes, in California you can lynch your friends. And while you might not be able to do it any other state, there you can even lynch yourself. California Penal Code 405.a reads, “The taking by means of a riot of any person from the lawful custody of any peace officer is a lynching.” So a person who attempts to pull away from a police officer in a certain situation can be charged with lynching.

So if the police have your friend and you try to pull him or her away – like the old school lynchers pulled away their victims to kill – you could be charged with lynching. But it’s not the pulling away part that’s lynching. It’s the doing something to that person that constitutes a crime.

Hampton faces us to four years in prison on the lynching charge. She’s scheduled to go to trial Thursday.

I’ve written here before about how an anti-lynching law in South Carolina has been most often used against black people. Kevin Garnett, the NBA star and future Hall of Famer, was arrested on a lynching charge in South Carolina because he reportedly watched a fight involving his friends on a school campus.

If everybody who had ever watched a school-yard fight were convicted of a lynching, there aren’t very many of us who could call ourselves innocent.

The law is often the enemy of wisdom. Laws often attempt to codify and spell out something that it takes common sense to recognize and define. The same holds true for so-called hate laws. I’m generally opposed to such statutes, partly because it seems that some people want them to apply to any and every crime.

For example, Michael Price, a pizza delivery driver was killed while doing his job last month, and some people – knowing nothing more than the fact that he had been killed – wanted his murder classified as a hate crime.

If every is a hate crime, then none is.

If killing a pizza delivery guy is a hate crime on par with, say, killing three civil rights workers who were fighting to get black people the vote, then that fight for voting rights doesn’t mean that much anymore.

The same is true for California’s lynching law. If a person tugging with an officer in defense of her friend can be charged with lynching than the memories of everybody who actually has been lynched is offended.

Kevin Johnson, the former NBA star who’s now the mayor of Sacramento, said on Twitter in January that while he believes people should obey the police, he doesn’t believe that pulling away somebody from the police should be defined in the law as a lynching.

During public comments last night I was shocked to learn, in CA removing someone from police custody is defined as “lynching”…(con’t)

— Kevin Johnson (@KJ_MayorJohnson) February 25, 2015

“It seemed very hypocritical and outrageous,” Hampton told The Guardian, “that … four uniformed white men came into my home, an African American woman, took me out of my home, put me in jail for standing up for black people – on lynching,” said Hampton, who has developed a public presence not just at rallies, but also through speaking at city council meetings and other venues.

“Under the circumstances of that day, it was apparent to me it was an intimidation tactic.”

That’s ironic because lynching was meant to be an intimidation tactic. I’m not saying that Hampton was lynched. If I did, I’d be guilty of the same sin California is. But it does appear that they are going overboard, being excessively cruel to make a point to others that might step out of line. And that’s a lot closer to lynching than anything Hampton is alleged to have done.

Cross posted at nola.com