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class="CH1"Student wins in court
By Diane Bukowski
The Michigan Citizen
June 8, 2005
DETROIT – Honor student Deidra Stokes triumphed in court June 28, but a conversation she had with Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick regarding her arrest outside Northern High School shows that Kilpatrick and the police may need a crash course in the constitutional rights of Detroiters.
Thirty-Sixth District Court Judge Mark Randon dismissed a charge of “impeding pedestrian traffic” brought against Stokes after Detroit police officer Jamale Turner failed to show up at her hearing. Turner briefly arrested Stokes March 15 in a sweep outside Northern, prior to an expected appearance there by Kilpatrick.
Stokes was only waiting for her mother to pick her up after completing that evening’s Upward Bound college prep class.
Stokes said she spoke with Kilpatrick about her case when she and her mother encountered him earlier in the month on a campaign stop.
“Mayor Kilpatrick said he had nothing to do with that, and I just should have given the police my ID,” said Stokes. “He told me he is a lawyer.”
Stokes had told the mayor that Turner asked for her ID when she was reluctant to leave the spot where her mother normally picks her up. When Stokes did not show her ID, Turner arrested her and put her in the back of his police car before ticketing her and releasing her to her mother.
“That’s garbage,” said long-time criminal defense attorney James C. Howarth. “This is neither Nazi Germany in the 1930’s nor South Africa in the 1950’s. You do not have to show your papers to police, with only two exceptions, if you are driving, or crossing an international border. If I want to leave my house and go to the corner to buy a cup of coffee, the police cannot require me to show ID. I have a right to say either, ‘I’m not showing it to you, or I don’t have any ID on me.’”
In 1979, Howarth argued the case of Michigan v. DeFillippo before the U.S. Supreme Court, on behalf of a defendant who had violated the Detroit “Stop and Identify” ordinance then in existence by failing to show identification. The defendant was searched pursuant to his arrest on the ordinance violation, and charged with drug possession.
Subsequent to the defendant’s arrest, the ordinance was declared unconstitutional by Michigan’s state appeals and supreme courts. By a 5-3 margin, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld DeFillippo’s conviction on the drug possession charges, but did not dispute the state courts’ rulings that the “Stop and ID” ordinance was unconstitutional.
In March of 2004, the U.S. Supreme Court held in the hotly-disputed case of Hibbel v. Sixth Judicial District Court of Nevada that individuals must give their names to police. Howarth said, however, that decision did not include the right to ask for identification papers.
Prior to press time, Kilpatrick’s communications chief Ceeon Quiett did not reply to several phone calls for comment.
Stokes’ mother Gloria Bland said that in preparation for Stokes trial, she had obtained a letter from Northern High School principal Marvin Youmans confirming that Stokes was present on the high school grounds for the Upward Bound course.
Youmans had earlier supported the police sweep in question, as well as other police sweeps periodically ordered by the Detroit Public Schools in school hallways.
Stokes’ attorney Shanta Driver said, “We’re planning to discuss with the family the possibility of a civil suit against the city false arrest and for harassment. What was done to Deidra is completely outrageous, and this would be really valuable to stop this kind of needless harassment against the youth of the city of Detroit.”
Pursuant to a petition by Mitchell’s Media Group, the Detroit city council has set a hearing on school police sweeps and other police harassment of Detroit youth for Thursday, July 28 at 10 a.m. Police Chief Ella Bully-Cummings, who has defended the sweeps, has been asked to be present.
For further information on the hearing, call Wyoman Mitchell at (313) 645-3376.