Nicole Deane believes Black Lives Matter. Nicole Deane believes Prisoners Lives Matter. And on the night of May 23rd, 2015, in the streets of Oakland, she put that conviction to the test by refusing the dispersal orders the Oakland Police gave, staying and taking an arrest. The protest that night was about #SayHerName, a movement in conjunction with #BlackLivesMatter against the slayings of women of color – like Reika Boyd, Kayla Moore, Natasha McKenna and so many more.
What Nicole didn’t believe was that she had anything out of the ordinary to fear from such an arrest. Yet that night, instead of being cited for “failure to disperse” – and released as almost all of her comrades who stayed were – she found herself hauled off in a police van and taken thirty miles to Santa Rita jail because of what the police claimed was an outstanding warrant.
An outstanding warrant from hell.
Five years ago Nicole, then a teen, was in a tragic accident. Losing control of the car she was driving on a treacherous stretch of road in the hills of central California, she hit an oncoming vehicle. The four occupants of the vehicle were injured, seriously but not horribly. Nicole herself was critically injured, remaining in a hospital for weeks. Her boyfriend, next to her in the passenger seat, the man she expected to marry, died.
Two years later Nicole graduated from USC and moved to Oakland. I don’t presume to know what is or was in her mind, but permit me to infer that she carried with her all the guilt, pain and anguish from that past that you, or I, could imagine, and then some.
Totally unbeknowst to her or to anyone she had contact with, a warrant for her arrest had been issued by the Kern County District Attorney, charging her with vehicular manslaughter. She had never been contacted by the Kern County DA or courts about it, she had never been served. Until that May night in Oakland the warrant lay dormant and apparently forgotten.
I don’t presume to know what goes through the minds of District Attorneys either. I do not know what went through the Kern County District Attorney’s mind when Alameda County notified Kern County they had Nicole in custody.
What we know is that the DA had access to the tragic history of the incident.
What we know, and what the DA certainly knows, is that the family of Nicole’s boyfriend has repeatedly asked the DA for the case to be dismissed.
What we know, and what the DA could have easily determined, is that in the years she has been in Oakland, Nicole has become a tireless advocate against police brutality and the prison-industrial complex. She was active in the campaign for Justice 4 Alan Blueford, a young black man killed by the Oakland police in 2012. She joined Critical Resistance, an organization devoted to prison abolition. When #BlackLivesMatter protests started last year she was there.
What we know in our hearts, and what any objective evaluation would certainly arrive at, is that prosecuting and attempting to imprison Nicole, as the DA continues to insist must be done, serves no one and is to no purpose. No punishment could be worse than the guilt and despair she likely felt and feels in these years after. She cannot be rehabilitated, for there is nothing of her that needs rehabilitating. Creating a ward of the state in lieu of a productive citizen working for social justice is the antithesis of what a sane justice system should be doing. But it is trying its damndest nonetheless.
A warrant from hell is what happens when you have a Criminal Injustice System.
Let’s be clear. While this particular Kafkaesque insanity is happening to Nicole, the vast, vast majority of Injustice happens to Black and Brown folk. People convicted in error and left to rot in prison, sometimes for life. People harassed on the street for the color of their skin, then sucked into the maw of the system. People left for months, even years, in jail because they cannot afford bail. People forced to take a plea deal because they cannot stay in jail for the months or years it might take for the system to judge their innocence. People thrown into debtors’ prison. The list of ways of oppression is essentially endless.
No, I have no idea what this particular District Attorney is thinking. What I do know, though is that we have a justice system which makes no sense, a system which manages to lock up more people than can even be graphed properly against other countries.
As Nicole’s sister, Alex, put it in her account of the accident and Nicole’s arrest
My sister, along with thousands of other Black Lives Matter movement activists, has spent more time in jail than George Zimmerman or Darren Wilson. This system needs to be dismantled.
Nicole has a lawyer. A damned good one. She goes to court on Thursday. She’ll have a chance to make a case and, if necessary, to be judged by a jury of her peers. Unlike millions of others.
Nicole believes Black Lives Matter. Nicole believes Prisoners Lives Matter. And every day that I’ve known her she’s put those beliefs into action. It’s time more of us did.
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