A Mother’s Worse Nightmare
On October 18, 2016, Seven Seconds, A Netflix series created by Veena Sud and Gavin O’Conner and produced by Johnathan Filley, Shana Fishcer Huber focused on a story about the injustice of a 15-year-old African American male by the name of Brenton Bulter who has died in a hit-in-run. The series starts off with, Peter Jablonski a white policeman, driving his truck on the phone and within a split second of him looking down he notices that he hits something. Getting out of the car he looks on the side to see a bike and automatically calls for backup. As he sits in the car, three police officers come to check out the scene. One police officer decides to go over on the other side of the road, where the body was laying, to see what he has hit. Seeing who it was, he goes back to the car and tells the other police officers not to go over to see who has been hit. Assuming that Brenton was dead, he advises officer Jablonski to go back to the hospital where his pregnant wife was and leave the crime scene. He adds that this incident was not seen by anyone and if someone was to find out, they will all get dragged, including the police department. Not knowing who he hits, Jablonski decides to take his friend’s advice and leave the body in the snow on the side of the road where it had been at. When Mr. and Mrs. Butler gets home, Mr. Butler plays a voicemail from the police station asking for the contact of Brenton Butler’s parents. Going to the hospital, shortly after Mr. Buter arrives a doctor tells them that Brenton is alive and stable. Once Jablonski finds out that he’s alive he goes to the police district and sees one of the police officers that were at the scene with him earlier that day. They get into an argument because Jablonski knows what they did was wrong, and he knows its going to blow up in their faces. The officer mentions that a white cop hitting a black kid showing up in the news is not going to express as an accident, so they have to try to cover it up or it’s over.
The public defenders of Brenton’s case Harper and Fish arrive at the hospital to let his parents know what has happened to him. The first public defender Harper, who is an alcoholic, notifies them that they have a man in custody, and he will be charged with leaving the scene of a motor vehicle accident resulting in serious bodily injury suggesting the maximum sentencing for this type of felony (3-5 years). To sum things up, the cops try to cover the hit and run up by blaming it on an old white man but once Harper the prosecutor goes to the junkyard where the crime scene is, she questions where Dorsey, the person accused of hitting Brenton, is the one who actually it did once she noticed that his seat was inclined all the way back.
In this situation, you have corrupted police officers who are willing to lie and accuse an innocent old man of committing a crime. In class, we discussed how within the criminal justice system there are corrupted police. Some police officers will abuse their power and, in this case, accusing innocent people of a crime they didn’t commit. On the other hand, representing Brenton was a drunk prosecutor who in the film wasn’t organized and didn’t have anything in order. By law and in this case, Brenton was assigned an attorney, and judging by the way they reacted to the arrival of Harper they accepted them to represent them. Just because you are appointed an attorney doesn’t mean that you will have the best attorney and Harper wasn’t the best. This is a theme of a middle-class African American family who has a drunk attorney to represent them because that is what they can afford in an attorney. In class, we discussed that because of some people’s economic struggles they aren’t able to get the best support, and sometimes they won’t even get justice. This is something that needs to be corrected in the criminal justice system.
What I have learned from watching this episode is that police officers have no problem abusing their power and that justice often gets hidden just because someone can not afford a good lawyer. It is a shame that in society and within the criminal justice system that it is people out there that do not care for justice but would much rather cover themselves. In contrast, one thing that I agreed with in this film is that Officer Jablonski was willing to turn himself in because he knows he did wrong. The officers did not let him because they were scared that he was going to be ridiculed and he doesn’t need that right now because he is about to have a son. I think this was a great point that was made in this episode that sometimes it’s not the person that does the crime but it’s the people that know about it who can influence you to do things that you don’t want to do.