Guilty When Black. Carol Mersch
had been ushered out of the courtroom by sheriff’s deputies and told to leave the courthouse. As he made his way through the foyer, he spotted witness Torrance Williams and stopped briefly to thank him for his testimony. Williams said the exchange was respectful and he apologized for the torture his family was going through. “I took one look at the family, and I couldn’t lie,” he said.
Courtroom deputies were keeping an eye on Keontae and suspected that he was threatening the witness. They told him in no uncertain terms that he was to walk away from the courtroom and leave, which he did. As he proceeded toward the third-floor escalators to leave the courthouse, however, deputies abruptly ordered him to stop, pulled his hands behind his back, and began to handcuff him.
Keontae’s aunt, Antonille, was coming up the escalator and was caught off guard. “What’s going on?” she asked Keontae. He reached in his pocket and attempted to toss her his car keys, knowing his car on the ground level would be towed if he was booked. As he was trying to explain, deputies ushered him into to an adjacent stairwell and slammed him against a wall, busting his lower lip. He was then escorted into a holding cell in the courthouse, where the arrest report states “a struggle ensued.” He was thrown to the floor with enough force to crack his cell phone and dislodge a gold earring. When the gold earring landed on the floor, the deputy smashed it with his foot. The arrest report contains details of the alleged events as reported by the sheriff’s deputy:
I walked Keontae Moses down to the holding cells when he started to fight with us we were taking his property from him to place him in a holding cell. At that time took Keontae Moses to the ground to place leg shackles on him to keep him from kicking us. While on the ground waiting to place leg shackles on him to keep him from kicking us… I removed my Taser and placed it between his shoulders and informed Keontae Moses that if he moved or tried to kick that he would be tased.
Keontae said a struggle never happened. He denied that he ever kicked or fought with the deputies and doesn’t recall a Taser stuck in his back or that the deputies really needed one. As evidence of events in the arrest, the report listed “videos found on courthouse cameras located at the Tulsa Courthouse,” but when a written request was made for a copy of the videos, the Sheriff’s Office responded that they could find “no records responsive to the request.”
Chrisandria now had a daughter and a son behind bars.
9
Jailed in the heartland
A half mile north of the courthouse, Miashah was incarcerated in a large windowless concrete structure in downtown Tulsa where visitors are body-scanned for metal objects and weapons. Cell phones and suspicious paraphernalia are seized. Anyone wearing a hoodie is turned away.
When booked into the Tulsa County Jail on November 19, 2013, Miashah joined a cadre of over a thousand women. Oklahoma has the highest rate of female incarceration in the nation—and the world. At the time Miashah was taken to jail, Oklahoma’s incarceration rate for women was nearly double the national average, fueled by draconian sentencing laws that hold women longer than men for similar crimes.51
Ed Martinez, Jr., a local Hispanic businessman from Tulsa, noted in a 2015 news article that his daughters and other young women frequently describe a common theme when they come into contact with law enforcement:
“Their cell phones are seized, which seems like a personal violation. If they try to prevent this violation, they are threatened with obstruction of justice charges. Women stopped for suspected traffic violations are immediately asked for permission to search their car without probable cause. If they decline, they are threatened with arrest. Once they enter the criminal justice system, they are assessed with multiple fines and fees, most of which support the criminal justice system itself. The state of Oklahoma also enforces sentencing enhancements, mandatory minimums, and harsh drug laws that result in unnecessary felony convictions and long prison sentences for non-violent women.”52
Multiple charges stemming from a single violation are often piled on by the arresting officer in a practice known as “stacking,” where related charges and fines are imposed for essentially the same violation. Many women are unable to pay the steep fines and court costs, and warrants are issued for “failure to pay” and new fines and court costs are added to the old. The system disproportionately harms poor people—and therefore minorities who are disproportionately poor—who often can’t afford to miss work, pay for daycare, or find transportation to appear at court hearings and to make payments.
This system, called “policing for profit,” feeds on itself, resulting in endless layers of debt for offenders as municipalities and counties attempt to raise revenue on the backs of their most vulnerable citizens to fund administrative costs that often have little to do with judicial procedures, such as law library fees, forensic science improvement fees, trauma care assistance fund, and the information systems revolving fund. Fees and fines make up nearly all of the court system’s budget, which means the deputies that arrested Keontae were funded largely by the same low-income people—like Miashah and Keontae—they wield a hammer over.
Unless she were exonerated, Miashah was destined to vanish into the ubiquitous cavern of the living female dead, their hopes and those of their families decimated in the teeth of a merciless legal grinder.
10
Fleeting freedom
NINE months after Miashah’s arrest, an ugly comedy of errors ensued when Judge Caputo set Miashah’s bond at $60,000. Bail bondsman Dennis Wharton arranged for bail at no charge to the family, and Miashah was, for 24-hours, free. The next evening, however, at the insistence of Assistant DA Steve Kunzweiler, she was ordered back to court for a hearing the next morning at 9:00 a.m.
Her attorney, Sharon Holmes, attempted to reach Chrisandria, Miashah’s mother, that night with no luck, as Chrisandria was working the evening shift at a nursing home with no access to her cell phone. Chrisandria was the prime contact for Miashah, since Miashah did not own a cell phone or a car. Though neither Chrisandria nor Miashah had been informed of the hearing, it began as scheduled at 9:00 a.m. the next morning in Judge Caputo’s courtroom.
It was in this freak-show nightmare that Miashah’s bond began to unravel.
At the hearing, Kunzweiler appeared upset over TV news coverage announcing that Miashah had been released from jail on bond. Judge Caputo, in turn, was upset that Holmes had not advised him of Judge Youll’s earlier no-bond ruling. Caputo became further agitated when Miashah failed to appear. Kunzweiler pushed for a total bond of $1 million, $500,000 for each dead child, but Caputo lowered the bond to $250,000 per child for a total of $500,000, and the hearing was adjourned.
Chrisandria finally received Holmes’s text message 15 minutes before the 9:00 a.m. hearing was to begin. She and Miashah hurriedly dressed and rushed to the courthouse, arriving around 10:15 a.m., where Miashah was promptly handcuffed and taken back to jail.
Meanwhile, seemingly unaware of Miashah’s late arrival, Kunzweiler was standing on the courthouse steps advising news reporters that the defendant’s failure to appear proved she “was a flight risk” and “a danger to the community.”
It didn’t go unnoticed that long-time Tulsa DA Tim Harris was stepping down after 15 years in office and that Kunzweiler was throwing his hat in for the position. His aggressive stance in the case was perceived by some as a move to win public support by projecting himself as a no-holds-barred candidate who was “tough on crime.” For those in the north side of Tulsa, this meant that he was tough on blacks.
District Attorney Steve Kunzweiler (Courtesy: Tulsa World)
Chrisandria remembered the State’s witness, Torrance Williams, stating during a recess at the preliminary hearing on March 13, 2014, that he was pressured by the DA’s office to testify against Miashah in return for leniency on his outstanding drug charge. He said that in the days following the fire, two police officers had repeatedly come to his apartment and threatened to throw him and his family in jail if he didn’t agree to a statement saying Miashah had come to his apartment that day