Hommage a Ayanna Khadijah

Ayanna Khadijah is not a celebrity face, is not running for president, and – having the system of surveillance on her neck for years – is not going to make as much money in her life as the CEO of Exxon makes in one day.

However, unlike the fucking celebrities, the fucking presidential candidates, and the fucking CEO of Exxon, Khadijah is a real human being. She was the victim of a ridiculous police raid to enforce the wholly monstrous laws against illicit substances in Norwalk, Connecticut. The police illegally entered her apartment and found drugs which, she contends, they actually planted – well, from the article Khadijah, an extraordinarily decent person, doesn’t say planted, but LI will, being an extraordinary son of a bitch. She won her case, but was still given a suspended 3 year felony conviction. Why?

…Ayanna Khadijah, 34, …. was convicted of the felony version of failure to appear after she failed to wake up from a nap and arrived 45 minutes late to court one day in August 2003. Her case is extraordinary because she fought back.
It was the only court date Ms. Khadijah missed among 45 sessions over three years defending herself against a set of drug charges that were eventually dismissed, in 2005. Ms. Khadijah, a single mother with a criminal history, received a suspended three-year sentence on the failure-to-appear charge.
She had spent the day before she was late for court at her job as a community organizer and then delivered newspapers from 1 to 8 a.m. Prosecutors argued that she should have known better than to work all night before a court appearance.

Khadijah had enough.

Connecticut’s appellate court overturned her conviction last fall after concluding that the inadvertent doze was not a willful shirking of responsibility. But the state is appealing to the State Supreme Court for fear the widely used tool could become harder to wield.
“We thought it set a bad example,” said John A. East III, a senior assistant state’s attorney, who argued in court papers that rather than rely on her boyfriend to rouse her, Ms. Khadijah should have set an alarm or perhaps brewed herself a strong cup of coffee.
But Gerald B. Lefcourt, a past president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said the case “is really right out of Catch-22.” “There’s no way to win when you have a system that is so inflexible and so lacking in understanding,” he said.

There’s no way to win is the whole point of the system. It is a rule like, you can't beat the house. The system is all about mistreating people until they become laboring and docile cattle – although hopeful cattle, because who knows if the products they see advertised on tv might not bring them happiness. And that is the name of the system, otherwise known as pandaemonium, or L'infame. The people who change it for the better aren’t, God help us, named Hilary Clinton or Joe Biden or Barak Obama, and they certainly don’t bear the names of media personalities that I’m just not going to pollute this post with. They are named Ayanna Khadijah. In this world of the drowned and the saved, she decided not to drown.