The Rape of Marcus Dixon By the Police and Courts of Georgia
LEGAL LYNCHING IS BACK IN STYLE
The Marcus Dixon Case
HERE IS AN INTERESTING QUESTION. DO WE WANT TO SENTENCE YOUNG MEN AND WOMEN TO PRISON FOR HAVING SEX WITH EACH OTHER? A SUBSTANTIAL MAJORITY OF CITIZENS HAVE ANSWERED THAT QUERY WITH A BIG, “I DON’T THINK SO!” IN THE NEXT PERIOD OF TIME, WE WILL FIND OUT IF THE SUPREME COURT OF GEORGIA AGREES, WHEN IT ISSUES ITS DECISION IN THE MARCUS DIXON CASE FROM FLOYD COUNTY GEORGIA.
AN UPDATE ON THE CASE WILL APPEAR IN THE NEXT WEEK OR SO HERE; THIS POSTING PRESENTS THE BACKGROUND ON THE MATTER, SO THAT USERS CAN GET A CLUE WHAT IN THE HELL IS HAPPENING IN DIXIE. THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE CAME OUT IN SEPTEMBER, 2003. A LINK TO A WEBSITE, INCLUDED HEREIN, GIVES A PARTIAL UPDATE SINCE LAST AUTUMN.
The courts of Georgia have ravaged Marcus Dixon. The prisons of Georgia are raping Marcus Dixon. The police and prosecutors of Georgia have lynched Marcus Dixon. If the citizens of this land allow this to continue, they are as much collaborators in this travesty as ‘good Germans’ were the lynchpins of Nazism. Before a single cynical suburbanite snickers at the ‘special pleading’ of another Black criminal, he would do well to pay close attention. A little background is necessary, in order to establish the context of this contemporary tragedy.
Rage, as a response to injustice, is useless. It is, in certain cases, nonetheless hard to avoid. This story flows with the blood of the African diaspora. White guilt, and the fear that accompanies the undischarged debt of color, roils beneath the surface like a touch of nausea after a rich meal. Historical memory---hundreds of thousands of Black women raped as chattel and sharecroppers---gnaws like a cancer at the heart of Southern life, feeding this stream of shame that explodes now and again in the vilest expression of bigoted hatefulness.
The venue of this tale remains a bastion of the sons and daughters of the Ku Klux Klan. The setting is also a key component in the victory of ‘progressive’ Southern Republicans , like Sonny Perdue, who wants desperately to maintain a façade of respectability for the State of Georgia among erstwhile investors and partners from Europe. In Rome, Georgia, all of the contradictions and craziness, the panoply of problems and prospects of American life, bubble up like swamp gas in a dry spell.
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Three scenes, prior to the young Mr. Dixon’s case, illustrate this context. The first occurred thirty years ago. A dapper and unaccountably confident and winning young Black man was one of the first African Americans to integrate Floyd County’s Pepperell High School, the would be alma mater as well of Marcus Dixon. As always among youngsters exploring sex, nothing attracts a young woman as much as confidence and humor.
Nick was slender and funny and handsome, a “sweet piece of chololate” by any standard. Nancy was a daring girl. She was defiant toward her family and authority generally. She was a White girl who wanted this Black boy as her beau. She also dated another callow fellow, however, the ‘boyfriend’ her parents wanted to see, who heard insinuations of this ongoing miscegenation from sneering friends.
One October afternoon, as the sixth period bell filled the hallways to overflowing, Nick sprinted through this sea of humanity like a dark gazelle fleeing doom. Mark, truant from his own classroom, ran in pursuit, a little pistol in his hand. Someone had warned Nancy, and she was discretely absent.
“Crack! Crack! Crack!” Human flotsam divided like the Red Sea, screaming and cowering away from bullets wildly fired and shouts of “fucking nigger!” Nick had only twenty feet to flee to reach a corner that would cover his retreat. The first shot hit him in the left shoulder and staggered his flight. The second and third rounds caught him in the right flank,, just below the kidney, and sent him reeling. Marcus Dixon’s godmother, Peri Jones, was fifteen at the time. “I saw(Nick)fall, and I thought he had tripped on the stairs. Then I heard him moan, I saw the blood.” His hands clawed so ferociously at the floor, “his fingers bent double and the nails came out at the roots. I’ll never forget it ‘til the day I die.”
Bystanders tackled Mark, as he continued to pull the trigger of his now empty gun. The KKK marched to Pepperell High School the following week, to express solidarity with the wronged White manhood of young Mark. Immediately bailed out of jail, he reached a plea bargain agreement that led to less than a year in a juvenile facility. In the eyes of many, the ‘criminal’ was Nick, who had dared to date a White girl in Rome, Georgia.
Eleven years later, a much more mundane imbroglio occurred, again at Pepperell. A small cabal of African American males included among their admirers several White girls, all devil-may-care insouciance and nervous girlish titters. A much larger contingent of White males, protectors of the innocence of their sisters and erstwhile girlfriends, confronted and bloodied the outnumbered Black boys one afternoon.
All of the brawlers faced suspension, and again the KKK came on the scene. They marched up to the school property once more, to offer witness to the color consciousness and prevalence of White supremacy among Anglos. Pepperell ended up expelling only two of the Black boys after the incident.
The most recent incident is also the most sinister. Darlington School, according to Ken Jones, Marcus Dixon’s godfather, “’at’s where all the doctor’s sons and lawyers sons and such go.” Darlington is a prestigious and rigorous prep school with over a century of history in the region. One young man there, a prominent attorney’s son, like Marcus Dixon excelled in the football program at his school.
As a senior, he also raped and beat a young woman attending Darlington as an exchange student, leaving her unconscious and savaged body for dead in the woods that are ubiquitous in the area. He faced charges, his father quickly arranged bail, and the boy pled guilty to simple battery, after his classmate for some reason dropped the charges of rape, aggravated assault, and kidnapping. This allowed the young assailant to escape with two years of probation. He plans to play football at a local university beginning this Fall.
These cases suggest a pattern that is disgusting. Whites get away with crimes, as long as the victim is ‘of color,’ especially if the victim is male and Black and has the temerity to touch a White girl. The case of Marcus Dixon transforms what is routinely awful into a situation that only hyperbole has a chance to describe. Marcus Dixon’s experience is a monstrosity of malice and misappropriated process.
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People need to be clear about something. Beginning at age twelve or thirteen, young human males and females begin to have sex, with each other on most occasions. To criminalize such behavior is tantamount to slitting our own throats, or more graphically, to amputating our own genitals. The point of the statutory rape laws has never been to criminalize even a small proportion of sexual activity among teens.
Rather, the laws serve the purpose of warning the clever seducer: beware of working wiles on girls much younger. The statutes also manage to cover sexuality in shame, immersing the erotic in the stink of brimstone. And they provide pretext, opportunistically, to destroy a young life for reasons of political advantage and social maneuvering. That is the case here.
There are no Black lawyers on the staff of the Floyd County District Attorney, nor are there faces of color among investigators in the County Police Department, which investigated Marcus’s case. Whereas the Darlington boy’s crime received zero coverage in Rome’s daily paper, the Tribune saw fit to plaster Marcus Dixon all over the front pages, always in his orange prison jump suit, frequently shackled. Though it was the first time Marcus faced a charge, the judge denied bond.
What, exactly, did Marcus Dixon do? Just after he turned eighteen, he had sex with a girl just shy of sixteen. The way this came to pass, and the wider social networks and relationships in play, since they are still the subjects of ongoing litigation, will await detailed presentation. Suffice it to say, that Marcus admitted to this fact freely, from the first day of the probe. It is also the conclusion reached by the jury.
Suffice it to say that handsome and powerful and sweet and funny Marcus Dixon was the subject of intense fantasies among young female students at Pepperell. They inundated his home. His White godparents, who so love this child that they have mortgaged their futures to stand up for him, both recall the twenty calls a day, overwhelmingly from White girls, that led them to get Marcus a cell phone when he was sixteen. Godmother Peri recalls many lengthy conversations with swooning sophomores and starstruck seniors. “They just loved Marcus.”
She had to weed out the girls whose parents would not approve of any liason whatsoever with a boy of color. Marcus frequently detected these supplicants as well. “She has issues at home, Mom,” he told Peri on many occasions. In eight years living with the Jones’s, both very astute and loving and open people, not once did they detect dark or hidden recesses to Marcus’s character. “He wasn’t perfect. Nobody is,” says Ken Jones, as honest and honorable a human being as it’s possible to imagine, short of Billy Budd or Jesus of Nazareth. “But he was a fine young man, a brilliant young man, and they’ve ruint his life.”
In fact, Marcus was a constant helpmate in the household, albeit some of this was because he relished making money. He baby sat multiple step nieces and nephews, many close to his own age. He acted as usher, chaperone, chauffer, and counselor for the extended clan. “When we get Marcus free,” says Peri, “I will not hesitate for a second to let him take my two nieces to the movies or to the Huddle House or anywhere else.”
Moreover, he volunteered at Peri’s Kindergarten, where, when the four and five year olds heard of Marcus’s plight, “it was mass hysteria,” according to Peri, several of the little ones inconsolable at the notion of “Big Marcus” in jail. Is it even vaguely imaginable, under such circumstances, that a rapist, a molestor, a brualizer would not peek out at some point from behind the mask of propriety? “You cannot live with someone, day in and day out, confiding and being confided in the way I was with Marcus, and not know, truly, what kind of person they are.”
Peri is not alone in this conclusion. Hundreds of Marcus’s acquaintances stand that same ground. Peri’s mother, staunchly religious and conservative, wrote “The Lynching of Marcus Dixon” in the aftermath of the trial. Peri’s 95 year old grandfather, a former officer in the KKK, swears by Marcus. “He’ll fight you,” says Ken Jones, “if’n you say the first bad thing about Marcus.”
What of the policing and trying of this matter? Perhaps this popular outpouring in favor of the young Dixon is just an instance of mass psychosis. What does the record show? As noted, the judge denied bond---on the basis of witnesses being scared of Marcus---though this was the only legal trouble in his life.
In addition, Leigh Patterson, the D.A. and Gary Conway, the investigating officer, constantly referred to Dixon as a “sexual predator,” in spite of there being no record or charges prior to this incident. The paper ran these allegations constantly. Even in this volatile climate rife with bias, the judge did not consider the request for a change of venue for even sixty seconds.
The police prepared a rape kit---a fuller account of the time of the alleged assault forthcoming after motions for retrial and such---which discovered semen in the complainant roughly forty eight hours after the pair had sex. The police did not send the kit for analysis, however, a violation of basic police procedure rules, and now they seem to have misplaced this evidence altogether.
During the trial, on several occasions, as witnesses offered exculpatory or rebuttal evidence in favor of Marcus’s defense, Judge Walter Matthews himself contradicted and disallowed the testimony. The D.A. was not objecting. The judge did this without any cause, other than whatever his own biases were.
Finally, as the jury deliberated, the foreman of the group insisted that one of the charges, “aggravated child molestation”, was a misdemeanor. “That boy won’t serve no time if we convict him,” other jurors testify the foreman said. When Judge Matthews levied fifteen years on this felony charge, ten of the members of the panel lodged a formal protest.
A television journalist, an African American named Tony Harris, took an interest in the case. He scheduled a meeting with Marcus at the Floyd County Jail, for 9:30 A.M. June 3. The afternoon prior he found out that “60 Minutes” might want to look into the situation. At 2:30 in the morning Peri got a call from Marcus. “They’re moving me mom.” This process allows the State to preclude contact for up to six weeks. Authorities moved Marcus in spite of knowing that a motion for retrial, and additional charges coming up for disposition, were pending and required defendant to be present.
The new charges, stemming from incidents which supposedly occurred last year or earlier, offer the prosecution the possibility of justifying inflammatory pretrial accusations that would otherwise have no basis. And the complainant’s family is suing the school for one and a half million dollars. Additional charges may demonstrate pattern and ‘notice’, necessary to allow a civil plaintiff to prevail in a law suit.
Two prominent law firms have offered pro bono help with the appeal. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference is one of several groups from Atlanta and elsewhere around the South that are rallying to the aid of Marcus Dixon, led primarily by his two families, White and Black, and by his rainbow cast of friends and acquaintances. Dr. Joseph Lowery, Martin Luther King’s mentor and longtime president of SCLC compared Marcus Dixon’s pass to “the reintroduction of slavery in the South, where they terrorize and emasculate us for being human, and deny us any modicum of fundamental human rights.” He promised darkly, that, “this will not go unprotested.”
Thus far, Floyd County authorities have chosen not to comment, although they will have other opportunities as further developments demonstrate the issues raised here more fully.
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Faye Coffield is a private investigator who has assumed temporary legal guardianship of Marcus. A former Atlanta police sergeant, she is merciless in shredding the legal and procedural work of Floyd County’s establishment. “This whole case sickens me. I’m from California, and New York, and I didn’t think this kind of thing could go on in the year 2003. I’ll tell you this, Governor Perdue is going to see a lot of me, until Marcus Dixon goes free.”
Coffield has put hundreds of pro bono hours into the case. She’s ready to devote her life to it. She has put plenty of sex offenders behind bars. She is not a woman to tolerate even a hint of degradation of the feminine. “I’m going to see that Marcus Dixon goes free because he’s no rapist. This is insane. It’s that simple.”
With a wistful look in her eye, she ponders the effect of a case like this on Georgia’s international standing. “I’ll tell you what I’m gonna tell folks.” She smiles as she finishes a piece of chicken. “Don’t ya’ll bring your children to Georgia---unless you want them to go to prison for having sex.”