Amy Myers - Final Report

The Center for Constitutional Rights (‘CCR’) is not only a progressive organisation, it is actually quite radical. I remember one of the Attorney Fellows saying ‘we keep talking around the edges when we need to get at the heart – what we should be aiming for is radical liberation to make CCR obsolete.’ I arrived in New York on the 8^th November, the day that Trump was elected. CCR deals in daily crises. But to CCR, this presidency sits alongside the September 11 2001 crisis in terms of its scope of affecting the very fabric of what freedom and constitutional values looks like in America.

I now have a richer and more nuanced understanding of what ‘movement lawyering’ involves. This differs from traditional lawyering because it involves empowering the individuals CCR works for, with attorneys being mouthpieces who trust the judgments of the impacted communities they represent. This leads to independence of those groups and deeper community led systemic change. It has been my privilege to contribute to the work of CCR. Interning there has been the most formative experience of the last few years of my life.

Being in the environment of CCR, decorated with activist posters spanning 30 years (one poster depicted the fight for water rights at Standing Rock and was dated 1987), working with some of the most earnest and dedicated activists I have met was incredibly uplifting. The staff encouraged my activities outside of the internship, such as my personal trip to Standing Rock and my involvement in the NYPD officer, Richard Haste’s trial. CCR is run by activists who are intimately involved with the communities they represent. Everyone attended protests regularly, and during this time they were really regular! One employee from the communications team had spent three years in a Federal Prison for protecting animal rights. The staff there are the real deal.

One of the great things about the internship was the additional training that CCR offered me. I undertook the National Lawyers Guild (‘NLG’) legal observer and jail support training. This training outlined the importance of the public presence of Legal Observers at demonstrations, and taught me some skills about how to manage the police in these circumstances. I attended the Inauguration Day protests on the 20^th January with a CCR staff member who was an experienced Legal Observer, and on several occasions she explained police tactics to me, such as ‘kettling’ people. This is where police herd people into a corner and arrest everyone, sometimes for felony rioting as they did in D.C. that day. The significance of avoiding being swept up into one of those kettles was huge: many of those people are now fighting felony riot charges, some of which face 15 year jail terms.  The support that the NLG offers is vital to the functioning of U.S. democracy and I am happy to have some experience in how to participate in this.

It was important to throw myself into the work and be proactive because the attorneys are very busy. I didn’t receive much feedback, though I did receive a lot of appreciation and support. We had several staff lunches and drinks after work. I knew I had interests outside the international human rights docket and hoped to work on police accountability and prison reform. One day I received an email from a CCR staff member asking people to go to the NYPD hub, 1 Police Place (‘1PP’) to ‘pack the courtroom’ for a preliminary hearing of NYPD officer Richard Haste. He had killed an 18 year old unarmed black man 5 years earlier and he was close to going to trial. This was an opportunity for me to experience the internal workings of the NYPD. I took extensive notes of the hearing and wrote a blog about the experience of watching this, and was so affected by the facts of the case that I began going to meetings for Citizens United for Police Reform (‘CPR’) and Showing Up for Racial Justice’ (‘SURJ’).  At one of these meetings the organisers mentioned creating a record of the upcoming trial and I told the group about a task at my pervious internship where I helped coordinate the handwriting of an entire death penalty trial through a rotating roster of interns sitting in the court room with a pen and notepad. It was gruelling back in 2015 and I knew it would be difficult again now. But I made a guide of how to create an accurate record and assisted with this task over the 5 day trial of Richard Haste. It became incredibly useful for CPR making media statements.  Because of the lack of transparency around NYPD processes, it is now actually the only record that exists that is available to anyone outside of the NYPD. This experience sat alongside the traditional legal researcher role at CCR which I otherwise spent most of my time doing.

The trial piggy backed into writing an article for the racial justice publication, ColorLines. Whilst in court transcribing I met a writer and activist named Jen Marlowe and we began working on a feature story about the conduct of the trial and our experiences of watching and writing about it. The story recently ran alongside a profound short film about Ramarley Graham’s mother Constance Malcolm. The trial and experience of researching for that story revealed an incredible amount to me about the state of police accountability in the U.S., and the conspicuous and inconspicuous racism underpinning white supremacy which I now constantly see all around me. This has provided a further foundation for the work I hope to do in Australia in terms of police accountability, and indigenous rights.

Close to when I was leaving New York I approached an attorney and asked if I could help on a task about prison reform. We discussed how we struggle with working with a reformist agenda when we both share beliefs which lie closer to the abolition of the prison system. A great tension exists between these two positions. She allocated me a task concerning the indefinite solitary detention litigation in their Pelican Bay Prison case in California. I have since been working on that remotely with another intern. Since leaving I have also written a blog piece about the executions of four death row inmates in April 2017 in Arkansas. In this way I still feel tied to the office in New York and will continue to follow their work and participate through writing blog pieces whenever the opportunity arises.

I didn’t realise that by going to New York and interning at CCR during this time that I would be politically radicalised, and that my entire sense of the legitimacy of government and the current world order would shift. In a lot of ways I now feel much heavier with the weight that this awareness brings. But my experiences have given me a gritty determination that things must not only change in terms of peripheral law reform, but that entire power structures need to be dismantled. The challenge will now be to see how I can manage and reconcile these ways of thinking with finding work I consider valuable and useful for the impacted communities I intend to work for. I feel well equipped from my participation in the Global Internship Program to meet this challenge when I graduate in October 2017.