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You don’t have to take the last dollar. You don’t have to do the last thing just to show how great you are. And so, there are things you can teach lawyers on how to be effective and how to utilize their morality based around civil rights without being a civil rights lawyer. So, that’s a different challenge altogether. Ms. Lee: The pandemic has definitely impacted the practice in many ways. What have you seen? Attorney Burris: Our business has continued. All the law work that you can do without having to be in court every day, it’s done, all the interrogatories, all the depositions, all the expert witnesses. Nothing has stopped in that regard. We’re on the calendar, but we’re having Zoom hearings. We haven’t had a Zoom trial. But, I’m scheduled for one or two coming up in the next several months. I don’t want that to occur, but all the other ways of resolving the case without having the trial has continued. Ms. Lee: Has it expedited settlements? Attorney Burris: Yeah, I think it’s been very good for settlements. Actually, the truth of the matter, what’s been the best for settlements has been George Floyd, at least in the last nine months. Now, before that, we were always having good settlements. But, I think that the size of those settlements has gone up considerably since George Floyd. In large measure, since Rodney King, obviously, we’ve had more trials and more settlements because the general White population has seen that level of brutality. But, George Floyd has taken it to a whole new level because there, the White folks saw this and they could not identify with it. Surprisingly [in the Rodney King case], they thought Rodney King was the problem, so they never warmed to him. It’s not so much that they warmed to George Floyd, but they all could see that there was a knee on the back of his neck and they saw how long it was and they heard him cry out for his mama. They could feel that kind of pain. That’s what that meant to them, and so, therefore, that’s had a dramatic impact. And so, jurors now, they believe, are much more sophisticated and knowledgeable about these things. I just had this discussion. I did an interview in USA Today, yesterday, about the case. We were talking about jurors and the potential knowledge base that they have. That doesn’t mean they’re going to rule for you, but they knew a whole lot more about policing issues now than they did before, largely because, I think, there’s a continuum of course, but George Floyd clearly was a major breakthrough. Ms. Lee: I’m sure you have an opinion about the Breonna Taylor case in Kentucky which settled so quickly.
Attorney Burris: Well, it settled quickly because it was so outrageous. It’s the optics of it. They went into her house, a nursing student – a nice, nice person – and she gets shot and killed. The issue in the police shooting was that the tactics were bad. The liability comes from the tactics. One of those tactics is working on stale information for a search warrant that any kind of due diligence would have determined, one, that there wasn’t anything there. The guy that they were talking about hadn’t been there in ages and she had another life. They didn’t do due diligence, so, the lack of due diligence, then, ultimately, going to this house and resulting in this woman being killed, it was like an admission that they screwed up, here. Now, that’s not the same [in the related criminal case against Ms. Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker] because that’s a different look. And, what the police were able to rely upon was that, even though they got there bad faith and all, it was the guy who shot at us first, and, if... he hadn’t shot at us, maybe we wouldn’t have shot back, either. But, that’s why no criminal charges were filed. Although criminal charges could have been filed, that’s the analysis of it. Ms. Lee: Yes. I saw they just dropped all charges against him this week, earlier this week. That was a camouflage. Attorney Burris: He was in a self-defense mode. He didn’t know [if someone was] breaking into his house. He fired at them. Ms. Lee: What do you feel is the role of politics at this time and how do attorneys play into this? Politics being what it [is], the winner controls the judicial system and the judicial system controls the kind of justice you will get either on an everyday basis or on a social justice basis. And so, to me, the most significant aspect is the political processes. Now, what that means to me is that people with law degrees should be working on all aspects of this. They should be in the legislatures, whether it’s the state or congress or clerks VOLUME 23 • SPRING 2021
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