GUILTY WHEN BLACK

A Black woman gets trampled by Oklahoma’s criminal justice system in this exposé.

Journalist Mersch tells the story of Miashah Moses, a 23-year-old African American woman in Tulsa. In 2013, Moses left her two nieces, 4-year-old Noni and 18-month-old Nylah, alone in their apartment for about eight minutes while she took out the garbage. During that time, a fire broke out and killed the girls. The tragedy sparked a Kafkaesque criminal case against the distraught Moses. Held in jail for years on an unpayable $500,000 bond, she was charged at one point with second-degree murder by prosecutors who argued that she willfully neglected the girls by fleeing the apartment to buy drugs and started the fire by leaving a pan of grease heating on the stove. The case was weak: The supposed drug dealer testified that Moses was not the woman he met that day, and copious evidence surfaced that the building’s faulty wiring had caused similar fires. But Moses’ pro bono attorney never told her about the defective wiring and instead pressured her into a plea bargain and a 15-year sentence in Mabel Bassett Correctional Center, a squalid place. Mersch braids into the woman’s travails the experiences of other female inmates and of Moses’ extended family, including a mentally disturbed cousin who was murdered in prison after killing his father and an uncle found drowned under suspicious circumstances that the police never investigated. The author sets these misfortunes against a history of racial injustice in Tulsa dating back to the 1921 pogrom in which White mobs killed hundreds of Black residents and including a recent scandal in which the city’s police fabricated evidence against dozens of defendants.

Mersch makes Moses’ saga into a crackerjack legal narrative that has courtroom drama and intricate but lucid forensic analysis. There are sharply observed characters, including Moses’ fiercely protective mother, Chrisandria; the vindictive district attorney who viewed the defendant as a symbol of moral degeneracy; and the bullying, narcissistic judge who told Moses she had a 10-day window to retract her guilty plea but then denied her withdrawal petition. There’s considerable mayhem in the book (“She watched horrified as he fell, twisting and turning in the air, screaming as he descended, his arms flailing as he hurtled in a free fall onto the roof of the eight-story parking garage 17 stories below,” the author writes of a woman who denied pushing her husband to his death but wound up in Mabel Bassett anyway). The violence and plenty of punchy, if sometimes purplish, prose—“If you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, the sticky fingers of the law will suck you in like a Venus fly trap”—capture the ruinous twists of fate that bedevil the author’s subjects. Through Moses and her family, Mersch maps society’s very uneven playing field: the benefit of the doubt and lenient sentencing that White defendants receive for actions similar to Moses’; the poverty that puts Black people more often in harm’s way; the fines, fees, and court costs that saddle them with crippling debts for even trivial misdemeanors; the permanent stain a criminal record puts on a resume. The result is a troubling look at justice that is anything but colorblind.

A searing portrait of the blight of systemic bias and disadvantage in Black people’s lives.