CARLTON FLETCHER: Our community has lost its sense of decency

How do you stop before it’s too late?

— James Brown

This one really hit home.

We read every few weeks it seems about the latest murder or violent crime in our community, and we become a little less shocked at the taking of a life, a little more accepting of the “new reality” of “that’s just the way it is.” Usually, when the facts of each crime are revealed, the violence is gang- or drug-related or is a crime of passion, and we reason it away with “that’s what happens when you live that lifestyle.”

But the murder of Alex Mixon is a different story.

We may never know exactly what happened. I would expect some defense lawyer for the six who were responsible for Mixon’s death will try and spin some kind of story that makes the suspects choir boys, victims perhaps, of circumstances or the old standby “system” that made them into criminals.

But what these six did, according to an Albany Police Department report, was lure a family man who was working to provide for his family to an empty residence where they lay in wait. There, they apparently tried to rob him and ended up shooting him to death.

That APD was able to round up all of the suspects so quickly is a testament to the department’s skill at solving these horrendous cases, something I don’t think the community readily appreciates. I find it reassuring when people capable of such senseless brutality are off the streets and in a cage where they belong. Sadly, though, there are cynics who argue APD should be good at catching violent criminals like these because they get plenty of practice.

Hard to argue with that logic.

Citizens — with Ward I Albany City Commissioner Jon Howard leading the charge — who are looking for someone to blame have called for more police officers on the streets, more patrols, more weaponry, more arrests. And, in a perfect world, those calls make sense. But this is not a perfect world.

Because as hard as law enforcement officials work to solve these crimes, they have little to say with what happens after the criminals they’ve arrested make their way into the criminal justice system. Judges who have their own take on “justice” tend to lean toward keeping young criminals out of the system, even those who have committed such unspeakable acts, certain that a stern talking-to by your honor will set them straight.

Defense lawyers, who are bound to vigorously defend their clients, pervert justice by pointing their fingers at victims, creating far-fetched scenarios in which those victims are responsible for the violence enacted upon them, taking whatever measure to create doubt in jurors’ minds.

And the jury system has long been broken in a community in which anyone who has an actual job or “plenty of things better to do” lies, finagles and calls in favors to get out of jury duty and others with “nothing better to do” sit in judgment. So many on these juries, we discover after the fact, had a vested interest in the outcome and should have in no way been a part of the process.

Some in the community have wondered why the county’s district attorney hasn’t labeled this latest murder a hate crime, seeing as how six African-American teenagers collectively took the life of a white food delivery man. I understand the frustration — if the races of the suspects and the victim were reversed, there would most definitely have been such a cry — but I don’t believe this was a race-related incident. I have no proof, but all of the evidence points to either a crime of opportunity or a gang incident.

I believe the outcome would have been the same no matter the race or gender of the delivery person. These products of a society that glorifies the “outlaw” culture and cares little for the sanctity of human life did what they did, I believe, not out of hatred or racial anger but more for the status they misguidedly thought they’d earn in a gun-loving culture where differences are settled with bullets, not reason.

All of this speculation about the whys and the cultural finger-pointing matters little, though. What matters is that a man who, from all reports, was a good family man, lost his life senselessly. I only wish the hole that leaves in the lives of his family members and the people who loved him would be large enough to somehow swallow this violent culture and this corrupt criminal justice system and leave in their place a sense of decency that is rapidly becoming a quaint thing of the past, destined to go the way of the horse-drawn carriage and the ability to discern right from wrong.

Email Carlton Fletcher at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @ABH_Fletcher.