Photos by Heather Marino and Carol Lollis. Collage by Marino.
  MEDIA: Photo Gallery »

The waiting area outside the Superior Court room at the Hampshire County Courthouse is lined with benches and backed by tall, curved, greenhouse-style windows. On January 15 at around 2 p.m., the windows were heavy with melting snow and ice, the room was bright and the benches were full. About 30 or 40 college students and members of the community sat on the benches and floors, chatting about school and the events of the week.

These people were here to show their support at a pre-trial hearing for Jason Vassell, a premed student at UMass who is charged with two felonies and faces up to 30 years in prison. They were unable to sit in the already full courtroom, but didn’t seem bothered by the nosebleed seats.

Vassell, who is black, is under felony charges for stabbing two white men after they reportedly aimed racial insults at him and broke his nose. Only one of them has been charged, and only with disorderly conduct, violation of civil rights and assault and battery to intimidate with bodily injury (a misdemeanor). The hearing concerned access to certain records of the alleged victims in the case, Jonathan Bosse and John Bowes. The defense ultimately gained access to those records, but not without the prosecution’s being vocal about its displeasure with the attention the case was receiving.

First Deputy Assistant District Attorney Elizabeth Dunphy Farris, the fourth prosecutor to receive this case, called the defense’s proposed access to the records a “fishing expedition” and suggested that the prosecution would be seeking a change of venue moving forward, though she did not officially file a motion, as has been suggested in press reports.

Many in the crowd knew or heard about the Vassell case due to the efforts of the Western Massachusetts Coalition for Justice for Jason, a local organization that grew from two on-campus activist groups: the Committee for Justice for Jason, a University of Massachusetts student group, and  UMass Concerned Faculty and Librarians for Justice. Members of the latter group include many senior and esteemed professors, including the extensively published editor emeritus of the Massachusetts Review Jules Chametzky and Ekwueme Mike Thelwell of the Afro-American Studies department, who was involved with the civil rights movement and has taken a special interest in this case.

The number of community members who have offered Vassell support and the verve with which they have done it are staggering. Protests and vigils have been held in inclement weather. Hundreds marched on the District Attorney’s Office in Northampton and presented two separate petitions asking for the charges to be dropped, each with over 2,000 signatures. They have urged UMass Chancellor Robert C. Holub (who was hired to replace John Lombardi, the chancellor at the time of the incident) to reinstate Vassell and take a position on the case, as the university’s administration had remained neutral. This community is incensed not only because they believe a hate crime has occurred, but because they believe that Vassell has been brought under charges which don’t take into account various circumstances surrounding the crime or the backgrounds of Bosse and Bowes—charges brought, they say, due to racist assumptions underlying the actions of both the UMass police department and the district attorney’s office.

Throughout the waiting area on January 15, people held thick packets of dog-eared white paper held together by large paper clips. These were copies of the 52- page Memorandum of Law In Support of Motion to Dismiss filed by Vassell’s defense team. That team is made up of David P. Hoose and Luke Ryan of Amherst and now includes counsel from the Massachusetts ACLU in the person of John Reinstein (who joined the team January 9). The basis for the motion was “that the defendant has been selectively prosecuted because of his race, in violation of the rights guaranteed him by the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution and Articles I and XII of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights.”

The document, which will be heard by a judge at a pre-trial hearing on February 18, contains serious accusations for which no district attorney’s office or police department would want to be under scrutiny.  But the UMass Police Department and the  Northwestern District Attorney’s Office, which prosecutes cases in Hampshire and Franklin counties and is headed by District Attorney Elizabeth Scheibel, have been under close scrutiny by the public for this case since day one. The case has been packing courtrooms since Vassell’s very first hearing, when charter members of Justice for Jason mobilized about 40 students to appear in court.

Vassell is currently charged with two counts of aggravated assault and battery with a deadly weapon (charges that were reduced from initial charges of attempted murder) for stabbing Bowes and Bosse, who entered his dormitory building at UMass in February of 2008. Bosse and Bowes, who are white, were not students or members of the local community (both are from Milton). Apparently according to standard procedure, UMass gave Vassell the option of leaving school voluntarily or being expelled. A biology major hoping to study medicine in good academic standing with a semester left in his senior year, Vassell decided to leave rather than have the expulsion on his record.

*

The defense’s Motion to Dismiss contains an outline of the events of the early morning hours of February 3, 2008 when the incident took place, based on facts agreed upon by both the Commonwealth and the defendant. According to the Motion to Dismiss, Vassell was in his dorm room with two female students. When one of the women moved to open the window, she noticed a white male peering in who “said that he wanted to be friends with her.” She was “creeped out” by his demeanor and the fact that the man “had been spying on them,” as one of the women felt; that seems to be what prompted Vassell to tell the man to get away from the window. According to Vassell, both the eyewitnesses and Vassell’s next door neighbor, the men outside Vassell’s window were then heard yelling racial slurs at Vassell, including: “You’re a dirty nigger!” The defense claims that one of the two men subsequently smashed Vassell’s window.

Vassell called a friend for help, and claims that when he let his friend in, Bosse and Bowes, who later admitted to having been drinking, tailgated behind the friend in order to enter the building (police statements imply that some are of the opinion that Vassell let them in). Vassell had brought a small knife with him, supposedly for protection because he feared for his life. Housing staff was alerted. During the ensuing scuffle more racial slurs were reportedly heard as well as efforts by Vassell to quell the fight.

The first punch that was thrown broke Vassell’s nose. Vassell then “defended himself with the knife” before escaping behind a locked door. The defense claims it was Vassell who told someone to call the police.

Police arrived on the scene; here the account becomes complicated. Vassell was put in handcuffs, then taken out of them when the police learned that his window had been broken. He was not initially arrested. According to Professor Thelwell, “Jason said… that the young Hispanic officer [named Antonmarchi] in charge of the group treated him with courtesy, appropriately.” And witnesses’ accounts, which are quoted in the motion, seem to corroborate Vassell’s version of the story. Bosse’s and Bowes’ accounts are cloudy at best.

The real controversy surrounding the handling of the incident by the UMass police department starts when the on-call police lieutenant, Robert Thrasher, got involved and another officer opined that what had occurred was a drug deal gone bad. The Motion to Dismiss makes it clear that Vassell told the police straight out that he feared for his life, and said at one point, “Many of us haven’t gotten away in the past.” He was confident that the videotape from the security in the dorm lobby would corroborate his story. Clearly, the racial implications of the incident were evident at least to Vassell if not Thrasher.

Vassell was stunned when he went to the police office later that day to press charges against Bosse and Bowes and ended up being arrested.

Thrasher was informed by an officer at the scene that “[Bosse and Bowes] were calling [Vassell] a nigger… They smashed his window,” an account backed up by three eyewitnesses. Despite this, the defense claims, and in spite of the clear evidence that drugs were not involved in the altercation, Thrasher stuck to the drug deal scenario. At one point in the early morning Thrasher stated: “A couple of white kids go in and start harassing some poor black kid in his bedroom. Now how poor of a black kid he is, I don’t know, because I think he is a drug dealer. They get into a fucking knife fight in that lower lobby.”

Thrasher proceeded to call Vassell a “donkey” and an “asshole” as the day went on. It is even suggested that he gave Bosse and Bowes more leeway when questioning them and joked with one of them about the upcoming Superbowl.

Thrasher was in possession of police records that described numerous incidents involving Bowes; in at least one case he was charged with a civil rights violation for attacking a black man. Bosse’s rap sheet is similarly lengthy, and includes two incidents in which he became physical with the police. Once—nine days before the incident at UMass, according to court documents—he attacked an off-duty Hispanic police officer and an Asian fireman; in another incident 25 days after his encounter with Vassell, the record shows,  Bosse attacked a mounted officer and his horse. It’s since been alleged that the two run in a gang-like group who call themselves the “East Milton Mafia.”

*

Until the incident, according to those who call for Scheibel’s office to drop the charges and for UMass to reinstate him, Vassell was a straight arrow. He had never been involved in previous criminal activity and had no prior record. Vassell has been described as “hardworking,” “serious” and “mannerly.” Those who claim to know him are confident that he would be “the last person” to commit a crime as serious as the ones he is accused of.

The son of Jamaican immigrants, Vassell now lives with his parents in Mattapan (a neighborhood of Boston). He comes from a large family that, in the words of Professor Thelwell, “evidence[s] what you might consider immigrant optimism and immigrant energy.” Thelwell calls Vassell and his siblings, many of whom are products of the UMass system (including Vassell’s brother, a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy), “poster children for public education.”

Vassell’s father works as an electrician. In fact, according to Thelwell, the small knife in question was obtained from the toolbox Vassell uses when he helps his father. Vassell’s own paid employment was as a personal care assistant for a disabled man. He also volunteered for the university program Student Bridges, which reaches out to Holyoke students.

In a piece Thelwell wrote outlining his and others’ opposition to the seriousness of the charges brought against Vassell and the racial implications of the case, he cites a letter written by another professor calling Vassell “…one of the most mild-mannered students I’ve taught in 12 years of teaching.” “Jason has fallen into the clutches of two unthinking, unfeeling, rigid bureaucracies,” said Thelwell in an interview. “The first is the bureaucracy of the university—which has set categories to fit everything in—beginning with the police with their assumptions of a drug deal gone bad. The other bureaucracy in which he’s enmeshed is a prosecutor’s office.”

But if these institutions are indeed unfeeling and by-the-book, as Thelwell suggests, one would think the prosecution would have charged Bosse and Bowes to the fullest extent of the law. According to the logic of Vassell’s supporters, the institutions have at least a subconscious notion of racial profiles. The irony, Thelwell claims, is that they have gotten the profiles wrong: “It’s clear that somebody, on the police or elsewhere, have a standard profile of an inner city youth who’s violent. Had Vassell fit that profile, he could have handled the situation much more comfortably. But the people who were acquainted with and comfortable with violence were the intruders.”

Professor Thelwell says he personally experienced racial profiling by the UMass Police Department on two separate occasions. Yet another case still more relevant to Vassell’s and the charges of selective prosecution is the case of Demian Vennell, a black man who at one time worked as a UMass security guard. Vennell came to the aid of another black man who was being beaten by 10 white males who had been heard to utter at least one racial slur.

Despite accounts from four eyewitnesses and a letter in which the man who had been beaten expressed the belief that Vennell had saved his life, Vennell was the only person arrested and prosecuted.

According to one witness, a woman of color, one of the officers on the scene struck her leg with a flashlight and told her to “shut the fuck up.” The Commonwealth charged Vennell with assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, assault and battery, and disorderly conduct. Interestingly, Vennell’s case was dismissed the day Vassell was arraigned.

The prosecution’s alleged pattern of racial distinction in conjunction with its seeming disregard of the criminal records of Bosse and Bowes in its determination of how to press charges is crucial to the defense’s motion to dismiss. In supplements to the motion, the defense cites the National District Attorneys’ Association’s National Prosecution Standards, which states that the prosecution’s decisions must be based on “all relevant investigative information, personal data, case records, and criminal history information necessary to render sound and reasonable decisions.” That the prosecution failed to adhere to these standards is “further evidence of discriminatory law enforcement” and instrumental to this argument, the defense says.

The Motion to Dismiss does not claim to determine whether or not Vassell committed a crime. Rather, it attempts to answer why Vassell was charged with two Class A felonies while Bowes was charged with a misdemeanor and a civil rights violation and Bosse with nothing. Professor Thelwell is not alone in thinking that the prosecutor’s office as well as the university police acted in a way that suggests that racial profiles influenced their interpretation of the events of February 3. “What the university police told me,” says Thelwell, “is that [Vassell was arrested] at the insistence of the prosecutor’s office… that when the police sent the report into the prosecutor’s office, they came back and said, ‘You should have arrested Jason,’ and so forth, which is why Jason was arrested.” The defense claims that the prosecution “ultimately made these decisions based the race of the parties involved.”

*

These accusations of discriminatory law enforcement bring the kind of negative attention that might tempt a prosecutor to seek a change of venue, as Deputy Assistant DA Dunphy Farris suggested is a strategy the prosecution will employ. Dunphy Farris did not hold back in court when expressing the difficulties she had encountered thus far, not the least of which is the fact that she is the fourth prosecutor to have her hands on the case. (One of the initial prosecutors, Frank E. Flannery, who met with the Concerned Faculty last year, resigned his position shortly after turning the case over. It is not clear whether his resignation was due to controversy surrounding the case.)

But though both sides have the right to request a change of venue, it is unusual for it to be requested by the prosecution. As Judge Judd J. Carhart pointed out at the January 15 hearing, it is the prosecution who has the burden of proof—the defendant is innocent until proven guilty, not neither innocent nor guilty until a decision is reached.

Still, the growing attention this case has garnered is remarkable, and the community’s support of a young black man accused of a violent crime is further evidence to support Professor Thelwell’s theory that stereotypical racial profiles are the exact opposite of profiles of the individuals involved. On February 3, the one-year anniversary of the incident, a national call-in to DA Scheibel’s office was held, as well as a rally on the UMass campus that attracted many of the local news media. A statement by state Rep. Ellen Story in support of Vassell was read at the rally, and activist Malcom Chu informed the crowd that “civil rights leaders are aware of this case and are calling out for [sic] this injustice.”

English major William Syldor read a speech that received enthusiastic crowd response in which he called for “justice for a man who lived for others before himself, thrown now into the madness of being black and being accused.” The Western Massachusetts Coalition for Justice for Jason is holding an auction to benefit Vassell’s defense and has received donations from over 40 individuals and companies, including Noam Chomsky.

But despite claims made in court by Dunphy Farris that the defense is “infecting the jury pool,” a significant number of decriers of Vassell seem to exist in the blogosphere. A quick search of Masslive.com  reveals some opinionated statements that oppose the defense’s tactics and express  skepticism about Vassell’s account of the incident. One commenter writes:

“This whole thing is a fight over girls. There were girls (white girls) in Jason’s room and Bosse & Bowes started speaking with them as young men often do. ‘This enraged Vassell, who confronted the two men and the window became broken.’ This is a sexist man’s view that he can control who ‘his women’ speak to, not racism.”

Student activist and member of Justice for Jason Jasmin Torrejon recalls a vigil during which someone shouted from a dormitory window above Vassell’s supporters, “You stand up for people who stab other people.” However, she says, the majority of people they encounter are sympathetic to their cause. Charges of “reverse racism” have been flung at the activist groups; said one commenter, “It would never be said that a black guy made racial comments at a white guy to provoke the attack.”

UMass professor of psychology Louise M. Antony, who is an organizer and spokesperson for the Concerned Faculty, rebuts those charges, saying, “These are people who find it incredible that the cops could have racistly decided to prosecute Vassell. But they find it perfectly believable that we would be capable of feelings of just saying, ‘Oh, he’s a black person so we automatically support him; they’re white people, so we’re automatically against them.’ If you think a little bit about human psychology, it’s pretty implausible that this group of people would be simply saying, ‘Oh, I see the colors of the skins, I know who I support and who I don’t.’” The facts of the case, she claims, speak for themselves.

Certainly, as so many have pointed out, the videotape will be telling, and what is recorded on it will most likely have its day in open court. But if a crime took place, it is not directly addressed in the defense’s Motion to Dismiss. That question will be addressed during the trial. However, it is the right of the defendant to examine the circumstances under which he was charged and question those who brought the charges. If it is determined that those circumstances are inadmissible, then the existing charges may be dismissed.

It is also the public’s right to examine its elected officials. The national mood in the wake of an election of the first president of color will perhaps droop with the suggestion that plain, old-fashioned racism is operative in certain tributaries of the justice system, especially in a county and state known for their liberalism. But many in the local community at least have recognized the unpleasant possibility.

To find out more about the activist groups involved in the Vassell case, visit www.justiceforjason.org.