Photo courtesy of WSBTV News
Yesterday, a jury in Fulton County Superior Court handed down a death sentence for Cleveland Clark in a murder-for-hire case that had all the intrigue of a potboiling mystery novel.
The story, which by now may be familiar to many of you, is that Chiman Rai, a native of India, hired Clark to kill Sparkle Rai, Chiman’s daughter-in-law, because he did not want his son marrying an African-American woman, which Sparkle was.
I didn’t follow the case so I cannot comment on the validity of the verdict or the sentence. However, I do want to dispel the notion, perpetuated by the press and prosecution, that a man protesting the injustice of a system which has condemned him to near certain death, as Clark did during yesterday’s proceedings, is the equivalent of evil personified.
One of the prosecutors, Kellie Hill, commented after the proceedings that “the jury got to see the killer that Sparkle has to face, when they saw his outburst today. That’s exactly what they saw.”
That couldn’t be farther from the truth. Murderers come in all shapes and sizes, as do cabdrivers, cooks, plumbers, and yes, even lawyers. Clark’s decision to voice his disapproval by shouting, swearing, and banging a table, is proof of nothing else but his frustration, anger, and disappointment, perhaps at himself, perhaps at the prosecution or judge, or perhaps at everyone and everything. After all, the man was, up until that point, facing the possibility of death in a system that has historically and disproportionately sent blacks to death row. To conflate a protesting man with a murdering man makes the condemner no better than the condemned. It is egoism and racsim at its most extreme. I doubt Clark himself knows his true self, let alone the prosecutors or the press, who, assuredly, have had little if any contact with him.
It is truly the height of injustice if a condemned man cannot speak his mind without being vilified for it.
