By Leonard Levitt
Despite what some may naively think, racism still exists here, as the following two examples illustrate.
In the first, Virgil Mitchell, a 34-year-old native of
Trinidad, was freed last week from Rikers Island, where he had spent
two years awaiting trial for a murder he didn’t commit. The Daily News
reported his release last week.
His arrest stemmed from a shooting near a Caribbean music festival
in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx in 2017, when a man died and a
woman was wounded. Mitchell was sucked into the case by an anonymous
tip to Crime Stoppers. A witness then picked him out of a photo array
and a subsequent lineup.
What was the tip? It was that he had traveled to Trinidad right
after the festival, says his attorney, Murray Richman, who took over
the case in May. Richman says the trip had been arranged before the
shooting. “He had asked his boss for time off to attend a relative’s
funeral. He was working in same job for 10 years. He had no previous
arrest record.
“This happens all too often. People don’t have the wherewithal
to fight the system and nobody does a goddamn thing about it. The
police work was superficial. For two years, nobody even looks at the
file. If he [Mitchell] were white, this never would have happened.”
