Clarance Goode, Jr. : An Innocent Man on Oklahoma’s Death Row

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Police brutality thrives in places of ambiguity.  Places where everyone assumes that trust is shared.  Places where the past is assumed to have already passed.  Places where everybody says that people are just people. Places with few questions and countless answers. Places like Tulsa, Oklahoma.

 

On the night of August 25, 2005, Mitch Thompson, Tara Burchette-Thompson and 10-year-old Kyla Burchette were brutally murdered.  When an event like this happens in a predominantly white town, vengeance is swift…especially when the majority of the victims are white.

 

Classic criminal injustice tactics took over.

 

1. Squeeze the first person you find.

2. Suggest names.

3. Guide the first person to needed evidence.

4. Piece together the narrative.

5. Create witnesses.

6. Coax the witnesses through persuasion.

7. Use priors to solicit whatever information you need.

8. Make big public claims.

9. “Find” evidence.

10. Shout about justice over and over.

11. “Solve” the case.

12. Stand by your findings.

13. Coach everyone.

14. Use emotion.

15. Secure a conviction.

16. Push for the harshest sentence.

17. Scream for death.

18. AND…no matter what happens…Champion the bullshit you’ve created.

 

Thus, is the story of Clarance Goode Jr., a black Native-American man.

 

So, where was Clarance on the night of August 25, 2005?  Around 10pm, Clarance went home…as he and his mother were supposed to go visit his brother in prison the next day.  Multiple people came forward to testify to this fact.  After 10pm, the guys that Clarance had been hanging out with perpetrated a heinous crime.  Clarance didn’t hear about the tragedy until the next day. Then, the injustice creators took over.

 

The main perpetrator of the crime (not Clarance) was discovered quickly.  After admitting that he had been high on drugs when he committed the crime, he went through multiple variations of the events before he was guided to include Clarance.  It seems as if the police knew that Clarance had been with the guys earlier and were determined to implicate him as well.  Later, Mitch Thompson’s sister was brought in.  The police were aware that she was in a romantic relationship with Clarance and also had multiple criminal issues herself.  Based on a video in which the police intentionally turned off the sound that shows her being bullied for hours, it is clear that the police coaxed her into implicating Clarance in order to save her own skin.

 

On August 27, 2005, Clarance went to the station willingly to give a statement about being with the guys before the incident.  Upon his arrival, the police detained him and charged him with murder the next day.  True to form, the police went searching for a bullet to match their version of events.  While searching a grassy field, a detective (who was later sentenced to 42 months in federal prison for fabricating evidence in other cases) “magically” found the “right bullet” in the “right spot” after everybody else had been searching for hours.  The detective was even reportedly heard declaring, “I’ll do whatever it takes to get Clarance.”  If this is not a case of police brutality, I don’t know what is.  White cops determined to pin a rap on a black man.  At trial, a white prosecutor, a white jury and a white judge convicted Clarance and sentenced him to death.  From start to finish, white got to determine what was right.  Justice only seems to benefit one color in Oklahoma.

 

Though various facts have come to light that dispute the police’s version of events, prosecutors have stood by their fiction…and I have no doubt that they will continue to…until they get what they’ve wanted all along…a lynching in slow motion.

 

Will you help us save Clarance from the racist mob in blue?

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-The Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood