Barack Obama Part Eight

Claiming That Voter ID Laws Are Racist and Discriminatory

Many Americans believe that Voter ID requirements should be implemented at polling places, to reduce or eliminate the possibility of voter fraud occurring. They believe that voter fraud breeds distrust of government, and that voters who fear that their legitimate votes will be negated by fraudulent ones have reason to feel disenfranchised.

President Obama and his administration take a very different view. They contend that African Americans and Hispanics are considerably less likely than others to hold government-issued forms of photo ID. Thus they say that Voter ID laws are racially discriminatory and function as a modern-day equivalent of “poll taxes” that disenfranchise minorities.

The notion that a disproportionate number of nonwhites lack a photo ID can be traced most significantly to a deeply flawed November 2006 report by the left-wing Brennan Center for Justice. Indeed, a footnote in the report itself states plainly that “[t]he survey did not yield statistically significant results for differential rates of possession of citizenship documents by race, age, or other identified demographic factors.”

Notably, the Brennan Center statistics are sharply at odds with the findings of previous studies on voter-identification documents. For example, a 2008 American University survey in Maryland, Indiana, and Mississippi found that fewer than one-half of 1 percent of registered voters lacked a government-issued ID. Similarly, a 2006 survey of more than 36,000 voters found that only “23 people in the entire sample—less than one-tenth of one percent of reported voters—were unable to vote because of an ID requirement.”

Moreover, the Heritage Foundation notes that “every state that has passed a voter ID law has also ensured that the very small percentage of individuals who do not have a photo ID can easily obtain one for free if they cannot afford one.”

Notwithstanding the aforementioned facts, the Obama administration has characterized Voter ID as a civil-rights issue with deep racial implications. In a December 2011 speech condemning Voter ID laws, for instance, Attorney General Eric Holder said: “It is time to ask: What kind of nation and what kind of people do we want to be? Are we willing to allow this era—our era—to be remembered as the age when our nation’s proud tradition of expanding the franchise ended?”

In a May 2012 speech, Holder warned that “some of the achievements that defined the civil rights movement now hang, again, in the balance.”

Holder's contention that Voter ID laws are unnecessary was dealt an embarrassing blow in early 2012, when James O'Keefe, a 28-year-old white investigative journalist, posted online a video of himself walking into the polling place in Holder’s District of Columbia precinct, falsely identifying himself as Eric Holder (the highly prominent 61-year-old, black Attorney General), and asking for a ballot so he could vote in the Democratic primary which was being held that day. The video shows a poll worker responding to O'Keefe's request by willingly offering him Holder's ballot and making no effort to verify the young man's identity.

By June 2012, the Obama Justice Department of President Obama had filed suit against both Texas and South Carolina for having passed Voter ID statutes.

Opposition to Purging Voter Rolls of Ineligible Names

Invariably, opponents of Voter ID laws also oppose initiatives to purge voter rolls of ineligible names—e.g. people who are deceased, who have relocated to a different state or voting district, or who have been convicted of felonies. The Obama Department of Justice (DOJ) has made no effort to enforce laws requiring states to remove ineligible names from their voter rolls. In late May 2012, DOJ actually ordered the state of Florida to halt its efforts to verify the identity and eligibility of the people listed on its voter rolls.

But Florida election officials refused to comply, citing the fact that they had already identified some 53,000 still-registered voters who were deceased. Further, the officials estimated that some approximately 182,000 non-citizens were on Florida's registered-voter rolls as well.

Obama's DOJ filed suit against Florida on June 12, 2012.

In a July 2010 column for PJ Media, former DOJ Voting Section attorney J. Christian Adams exposed the Obama Justice Department's resolve to turn a blind eye to problems involving corrupted voter rolls. Adams wrote that in November 2009, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Julie Fernandes had bluntly told dozens of Voting Section employees: “We have no interest in enforcing this provision [voter list integrity] of the law. It has nothing to do with increasing turnout, and we are just not going to do it.”

The Trayvon Martin Case

When the black Sanford, Florida teenager Trayvon Martin was shot and killed in an altercation with a “white Hispanic” man named George Zimmerman on February 26, 2012, Obama lamented: “If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon.” Further, Obama urged all Americans “to do some soul-searching to figure out how does something like this happen.”

Obama did not explain why this particular incident should be weighted with such racial significance, given the fact that the overwhelming majority of interracial crime in the United States is black-on-white, and more than 90% of black homicide victims are killed by other blacks.

It was subsequently learned that the Martin-Zimmerman incident was by no means a case of stalking and cold-blooded murder, as the media and civil-rights activists (and, by, implication, Obama) had portrayed it. In fact, just prior to the shooting, Martin had been pummeling Zimmerman viciously, inflicting a broken nose, two black eyes, and a head wound on the latter. Moreover, before shooting Martin, Zimmerman had desperately cried out for help 14 times.

In July 2013, it was learned that in the immediate aftermath of the Martin killing, the Community Relations Service (CRS), a small office within the U.S. Department of Justice, sent taxpayer-funded political agitators to Sanford, where they helped organize protest demonstrations and convey the false impression that the killer had racial motives. At one of those rallies -- the March 31, 2012 "March for Trayvon Martin” -- the featured speaker, Al Sharpton, advocated for Zimmerman’s prosecution. According to journalist Matthew Vadum:

"DOJ documents provided to Judicial Watch under the Freedom of Information Act show that in the weeks before Zimmerman was charged, CRS expended thousands of dollars to help organize marches in which participants exacerbated racial tensions and loudly demanded that he be prosecuted.

"According to the documentation, CRS employees were involved in 'marches, demonstrations, and rallies related to the shooting and death of an African-American teen by a neighborhood watch captain'; providing 'support for protest deployment in Florida'; rendering 'technical assistance to the City of Sanford, event organizers, and law enforcement agencies for the march and rally on March 31 [2012]'; and providing 'technical assistance, conciliation, and onsite mediation during demonstrations planned in Sanford.'

"In April [2012], CRS 'set up a meeting between the local NAACP and elected officials that led to the temporary resignation of police chief Bill Lee, according to Turner Clayton, Seminole County chapter president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People,' the document dump revealed."

On July 19, 2013 -- a few days after Zimmerman was acquitted of murder and manslaughter charges -- Obama made a surprise appearance in the White House briefing room to issue a statement. His remarks included the following:

"First of all ... I send my thoughts and prayers, as well as Michelle’s, to the family of Trayvon Martin, and to remark on the incredible grace and dignity with which they’ve dealt with the entire situation....

"You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago. And when you think about why, in the African- American community at least, there’s a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it’s important to recognize that the African- American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that -- that doesn’t go away.

"There are very few African-American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me.

"And there are very few African-American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me, at least before I was a senator. There are very few African-Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off. That happens often.

"And you know, I don’t want to exaggerate this, but those sets of experiences inform how the African-American community interprets what happened one night in Florida. And it’s inescapable for people to bring those experiences to bear.

"The African-American community is also knowledgeable that there is a history of racial disparities in the application of our criminal laws, everything from the death penalty to enforcement of our drug laws. And that ends up having an impact in terms of how people interpret the case....

"We understand that some of the violence that takes place in poor black neighborhoods around the country is born out of a very violent past in this country, and that the poverty and dysfunction that we see in those communities can be traced to a very difficult history.

"And so the fact that sometimes that’s unacknowledged adds to the frustration. And the fact that a lot of African-American boys are painted with a broad brush and the excuse is given, well, there are these statistics out there that show that African-American boys are more violent -- using that as an excuse to then see sons treated differently causes pain.

"I think the African-American community is also not naive in understanding that statistically somebody like Trayvon Martin was probably statistically more likely to be shot by a peer than he was by somebody else.

"So -- so folks understand the challenges that exist for African- American boys, but they get frustrated, I think, if they feel that there’s no context for it or -- and that context is being denied. And -- and that all contributes, I think, to a sense that if a white male teen was involved in the same kind of scenario, that, from top to bottom, both the outcome and the aftermath might have been different....

"Number one, precisely because law enforcement is often determined at the state and local level, I think it’d be productive for the Justice Department -- governors, mayors to work with law enforcement about training at the state and local levels in order to reduce the kind of mistrust in the system that sometimes currently exists.

"You know, when I was in Illinois I passed racial profiling legislation. And it actually did just two simple things. One, it collected data on traffic stops and the race of the person who was stopped. But the other thing was it resourced us training police departments across the state on how to think about potential racial bias and ways to further professionalize what they were doing....

"Along the same lines, I think it would be useful for us to examine some state and local laws to see if it -- if they are designed in such a way that they may encourage the kinds of altercations and confrontations and tragedies that we saw in the Florida case, rather than diffuse potential altercations....

"We need to spend some time in thinking about how do we bolster and reinforce our African-American boys? And this is something that Michelle and I talk a lot about. There are a lot of kids out there who need help who are getting a lot of negative reinforcement. And is there more that we can do to give them the sense that their country cares about them and values them and is willing to invest in them?...

"And then finally, I think it’s going to be important for all of us to do some soul-searching.... [A]t least you ask yourself your own questions about, am I wringing as much bias out of myself as I can; am I judging people, as much as I can, based on not the color of their skin but the content of their character? That would, I think, be an appropriate exercise in the wake of this tragedy.

On August 7, 2013, Obama appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, who asked him to comment on the Trayvon Martin case. The President replied:

"Well, I think all of us were troubled by what happened.  And any of us who were parents can imagine the heartache that those parents went through. It doesn’t mean that Trayvon was a perfect kid -- none of us were. We were talking offstage -- when you’re a teenager, especially a teenage boy, you’re going to mess up, and you won’t always have the best judgment. But what I think all of us agree to is, is that we should have a criminal justice system that’s fair, that’s just. And what I wanted to try to explain was why this was a particularly sensitive topic for African American families, because a lot of people who have sons know the experience they had of being followed or being viewed suspiciously.

"We all know that young African American men disproportionately have involvement in criminal activities and violence -- for a lot of reasons, a lot of it having to do with poverty, a lot of it having to do with disruptions in their neighborhoods and their communities, and failing schools and all those things.  And that’s no excuse, but what we also believe in is, is that people -- everybody -- should be treated fairly and the system should work for everyone."

Obama's Commitment to Racial Preferences

In 2006, then-Senator Obama lamented the “stubborn gap that remains between the living standards of black, Latino and white workers.” To address this, he proposed “completing the unfinished business of the civil rights movement—namely, enforcing nondiscrimination laws in such basic areas as employment, housing and education.” Added Obama at the time: “The government, through its prosecutors and its courts, should step in to make things right.”

During Obama's first term as President, Attorney General Eric Holder used the threat of “disparate-impact” lawsuits—founded on the premise that businesses could be held liable for racial bias if any of its policies caused whites and blacks to be hired, promoted, approved for loans, etc. at disproportionate rates—to strong-arm U.S. banks into loan set-asides (reserved exclusively for nonwhites), racial lending quotas, and other concessions. For example, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and SunTrust all agreed to adopt lower loan-approval standards for nonwhites. As of November 2012, Holder had already authorized at least five lending-discrimination suits, while opening another 30 investigations against banks. In response, the American Bankers Association—seeking to avoid additional hassles from the government—advised its 5,000 members to give a “second look” to rejected minority loan applicants, with an eye toward making “changes in underwriting standards.”

In 2012 Richard Cordray, head of the Obama administration's newly formed Consumer Financial Protection Bureau [CFPB], announced that his Bureau would join the Department of Justice and the Department of Housing & Urban Development in enforcing disparate-impact doctrine to protect “communities of color” from “unfair lending practices” in “mortgages, student loans, credit cards and auto loans,” and small-business loans.

In November 2012, shortly after Obama's re-election in November 2012, journalist Paul Sperry reported that the President, during his second term in office, would continue to aggressively try to close gaps between whites and minorities in such areas as credit scores, homeownership rates, test scores, and graduation rates. Obama's remedy for those gaps, wrote Sperry, would be “to sue financial companies, schools and employers based on 'disparate impact' complaints—a stealthy way to achieve racial preferences.”

Sperry further reported that CFPB examiners were slated to subject America's consumer credit reporting agencies—including Equifax, Experian and TransUnion—to federal review in the form of an “effects test” that would prevent minority credit-card applicants from being rejected more frequently than whites, or being charged higher interest rates than whites, regardless of their credit ratings.

Also according to Sperry, “Other targets of the administration's 'racial justice' juggernaut include: standardized academic testing, professional licensing examinations, employee background checks, voter ID requirements, student disciplinary codes, prison sentencing guidelines—you name it. The goal is to equalize outcomes based on race without regard for performance or merit.”

Center for Equal Opportunity president Roger Clegg concurred that President Obama was entirely committed to “aggressively pushing the disparate-impact approach to civil-rights enforcement” through which “the federal government insists that the numbers come out right—even if it means that policemen and firefighters cannot be tested, that companies should hire criminals, that loans must be made to the uncreditworthy, and that—I kid you not—whether pollution is acceptable depends on whether dangerous chemicals are spread in a racially balanced way.”

Competitive Enterprise Institute counsel Hans Bader reported that the Obama administration was “pressuring school districts not to suspend violent or disruptive black students if they [the districts] have already disciplined 'too many' black students.” In a similar spirit, Obama's Education Department was investigating a “disparate-impact” complaint that the NAACP had recently filed, alleging that the entrance exam used by selective New York City high schools illegally discriminated against African Americans.

During his second inaugural address as president on January 21, 2013, the newly re-elected Obama made reference to alleged efforts to suppress the votes of certain demographic groups, particularly low-income nonwhite minorities: “Our journey is not complete until no citizen is forced to wait for hours to exercise the right to vote.”

Claims of Discrimination Against Black Schoolchildren

In a February 25, 2012 speech to the organization 100 Black Men of Atlanta, Attorney General Eric Holder lamented the findings of a 2011 study of discipline patterns in Texas schools. Holder said the study showed that “83 percent of African American male students and 74 percent of Hispanic male students ended up in trouble and suspended for some period of time” -- as compared to 59% of white male students. “We’ve often seen that students of color, students from disadvantaged backgrounds, and students with special needs are disproportionately likely to be suspended or expelled,” Holder stated. “This is, quite simply, unacceptable.… These unnecessary and destructive policies must be changed.” After citing the Texas study, Holder added that “tellingly, 97 percent of all suspensions were discretionary and reflected the administrator’s discipline philosophy as much as the student’s behavior.” In his speech, Holder ignored data indicating that the different discipline rates were consistent with differences in actual schoolyard behavior.

Holder revisited this theme in January 2014, when he and Education Secretary Arne Duncan issued the first-ever national guidelines for discipline in public schools. These guidelines demanded that schools adhere, as an Associated Press (AP) report put it, "to the principle of fairness and equity in student discipline or face strong action if they don't." "[I]n our investigations," said the administration, "we have found cases where African-American students were disciplined more harshly and more frequently because of their race than similarly situated white students. In short, racial discrimination in school discipline is a real problem." Holder, for his part, declared: "A routine school disciplinary infraction should land a student in the principal's office, not in a police precinct."

In particular, the Obama administration was troubled by the fact that:

Black students without disabilities were more than three times as likely as whites to be expelled or suspended.

Black students comprised more than a third of students suspended once, 44% of those suspended multiple times, and more than a third of those expelled.

Black and Hispanic students were more than half of those involved in school-related arrests or referred to law enforcement.

“Too often, said Holder, "so-called zero-tolerance policies [which mandate uniform and swift punishment for such offenses as truancy, smoking, or carrying a weapon], however well intentioned they might be, make students feel unwelcome in their own schools; they disrupt the learning process. And they can have significant and lasting negative effects on the long-term well-being of our young people, increasing their likelihood of future contact with the juvenile and criminal justice systems."

To address this matter, the Obama administration encouraged schools to:

ensure that all school personnel are trained in classroom management, conflict resolution and approaches to de-escalate classroom disruptions;

ensure that school personnel understand that they are responsible for administering routine student discipline instead of security or police officers;

draw clear distinctions about the responsibilities of school security personnel;

provide opportunities for school security officers to develop relationships with students and parents;

establish procedures on how to distinguish between disciplinary infractions appropriately handled by school officials compared with major threats to school safety; and

collect and monitor data that security or police officers take to ensure nondiscrimination.

As George Mason University professor Walter E. Williams observes:

"The nation’s educators can avoid sanctions by adopting a racial quota system for student discipline. So as Roger Clegg, president and general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity, predicts, 'school officials will either start disciplining students who shouldn’t be, or, more likely, will not discipline some students who ought to be.' I can imagine school administrators reasoning this way: 'Blacks are 20 percent of our student body, and 20 percent of suspensions this year have been of black students. In order to discipline another black student while maintaining our suspension quota, we will have to suspend some white students, whether they’re guilty or not.'"

In November 2014, syndicated columnist Thomas Sowell reported: "Under an implicit threat of losing their federal subsidies, the Minneapolis Public Schools have agreed to reduce the disparity in punishment of black students by 25 percent by the end of this school year, and then by 50 percent, 75 percent and finally 100 percent in each of the following years. In other words, there are now racial quota limits for punishment in the Minneapolis schools."

Obama Says Illegal Immigrants Should Not Be “Expelled from Our Country”

Also during his second inaugural address, Obama emphasized his commitment to passing “comprehensive immigration reform” and the DREAM Act, both of which would include a path-to-citizenship for illegals currently residing in the United States: “Our journey is not complete until we find a better way to welcome the striving, hopeful immigrants who still see America as a land of opportunity, until bright young students and engineers are enlisted in our workforce rather than expelled from our country.”

Obama Says That People From Mexico "Did Not Cross the Border, The Border Crossed Them"

When outgoing Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, who is of Mexican heritage, formally stepped down from his post in early February 2013, Obama suggested that the Hispanic Cabinet member was more authentically American than the Pilgrims of New England: "His ancestors were here before the Mayflower set sail." The president then echoed a phrase common among Nativists who believe that lands belong to ethnicities rather than to countries: "[Salazar and] his family did not cross the border, the border crossed them. And that's why, when I needed somebody to lead Interior, I didn't have to look very far."

Americans' View of Race Relations Has Deteriorated Greatly During Obama Administration: In June 2013, a poll by NBC and the Wall Street Journal reported that 52 percent of whites and 38 percent of blacks had a favorable opinion of race relations in the U.S.  At the beginning of Obama’s first term (4 and 1/2 years earlier, the corresponding figures were 79 percent and 63 percent.

Obama Speaks about America's Racial Injustice, Past and Present

In an August 23, 2013 speech at Binghamton University, Obama said:

“I think what we’ve also seen is that the legacy of discrimination—slavery, Jim Crow—has meant that some of the institutional barriers for success for a lot of groups still exist.  African American poverty in this country is still significantly higher than other groups.  Same is true for Latinos.  Same is true for Native Americans. And even if there weren’t active discrimination taking place right now—and obviously, we know that some discrimination still exists, although nothing like what existed 50 years ago—but let’s assume that we eliminated all discrimination magically, with a wand, and everybody had goodness in their heart.  You’d still have a situation in which there are a lot of folks who are poor and whose families have become dysfunctional because of a long legacy of poverty, and live in neighborhoods that are run down and schools that are underfunded and don’t have a strong property tax base.  And it would still be harder for young people born into those communities to succeed than those who were born elsewhere.”

Obama Marks the 50th Anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s “I Have a Dream” Speech by Emphasizing America's Racial Inequity

On August 28, 2013, Obama said:

“To secure the gains this country has made requires constant vigilance, not complacency. Whether it's by challenging those who erect new barriers to the vote or ensuring that the scales of justice work equally for all in the criminal justice system and not simply a pipeline from underfunded schools to overcrowded jails....

“Yes, there have been examples of success within black America that would have been unimaginable a half-century ago. But as has already been noted, black unemployment has remained almost twice as high as white employment, Latino unemployment close behind. The gap in wealth between races has not lessened, it's grown.”

Obama Commutes the Sentences of Eight Crack-Cocaine Offenders Convicted under "Unfair System"

On December 19, 2013, President Obama commuted the prison sentences of 8 (nonwhite) individuals who had been imprisoned for more than 15 years apiece for crack cocaine offenses committed at a time when the penalties for the possession of crack, a drug most often used by poor blacks, were approximately 100 times harsher than the penalties for possession of powder cocaine, whose users were typically affluent whites. (In 2010 Obama signed the Fair Sentencing Act, which narrowed the disparity of those penalties considerably.)

One of the individuals whose sentences Obama commuted was a first cousin of Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, one of the president’s most loyal supporters. Patrick's cousin, Reynolds Allen Wintersmith Jr., had been sentenced to life in prison in 1994 for cocaine possession and conspiracy to distribute cocaine and its products on behalf of a gang known as the Gangster Disciples.

Said Obama in a statement: “I am commuting the prison terms of eight men and women who were sentenced under an unfair system. Commuting the sentences of these eight Americans is an important step toward restoring fundamental ideals of justice and fairness.... If they had been sentenced under the current law, many of them would have already served their time and paid their debt to society. Instead, because of a disparity in the law that is now recognized as unjust, they remain in prison, separated from their families and their communities, at a cost of millions of taxpayer dollars each year.”

In addition to the 8 sentences he commuted, Obama also pardoned 13 individuals convicted of crack cocaine offenses.

Further, Obama urged Congress to approve additional sentencing-reform measures to ensure “that our justice system keeps its basic promise of equal treatment for all.”

Federal Hate-Crime Charge Against White Perpetrator of the "Knockout Game"

In the fall of 2013, media outlets like Breitbart News, Truth Revolt, and Fox News reported extensively on the growing prevalence of the so-called "knockout game," whereby groups of black teenagers were targeting defenseless and unsuspecting white, Jewish, and Asian pedestrians and blindsiding them with roundhouse punches designed to render the victims unconscious. Accomplices to the perpetrators commonly captured these attacks on video and posted them, as a form of celebration, to the website YouTube. Hundreds of these knockout-game incidents had occurred in cities nationwide since 2010. Many had resulted in serious injuries, and in several cases the victims had died.

The Obama administration, however, never took action against any of the perpetrators until December 2013, when Obama's Justice Department filed a federal hate-crimes charge against a 27-year-old Texas white man who targeted a 79-year-old black man with a "knockout-game" attack (which he also videotaped and subsequently boasted about to strangers).

Obama Says Racism Causes Some Voters to Dislike Him

In the January 27, 2014 issue of the New Yorker magazine, President Obama said: “There’s no doubt that there’s some folks who just really dislike me because they don’t like the idea of a black president.” “Now, the flip side of it,” added Obama, “is there are some black folks and maybe some white folks who really like me and give me the benefit of the doubt precisely because I’m a black president.”

Obama Lauds Al Sharpton and Warns That Voting Rights for Blacks Are in Peril

On April 11, 2014, President Obama spoke at Al Sharpton’s National Action Network convention in New York and said to Sharpton: “Of course, one thing that has not changed is your commitment to problems of civil rights for everybody and opportunity for all people.”

Focusing also on the issue of Republican proposals to tighten ID requirements for voting in political elections, Obama claimed that such measures would unfairly ­make it more difficult for millions of Americans to cast their ballots. Said Obama, to thunderous applause: “America did not stand up and did not march and did not sacrifice to gain the right to vote for themselves and others only to see it denied to their kids and their grandchildren. The stark, simple truth is this: The right to vote is threatened today.”

Obama Denounces the Death Penalty and Laments the "Significant Problems" Associated with the Execution of a Particular, Remorseless Black Murderer

On April 20, 2014, a 38-year-old, black Oklahoma man named Clayton Lockett was executed by lethal injection because he had raped and murdered a 19-year-old girl named Stephanie Neiman fifteen years earlier. The injection procedure was botched, however, and it took a full 43 minutes after the drug was administered before Lockett died. A TulsaWorld.com report provided background on the crime that had led to this execution:

Stephanie Neiman ... was dropping off a friend at a Perry [Oklahoma] residence on June 3, 1999, the same evening Clayton Lockett and two accomplices decided to pull a home invasion robbery there. Neiman fought Lockett when he tried to take the keys to her truck.

The men beat her and used duct tape to bind her hands and cover her mouth. Even after being kidnapped and driven to a dusty country road, Neiman didn’t back down when Lockett asked if she planned to contact police.

The men had also beaten and kidnapped Neiman’s friend along with Bobby Bornt, who lived in the residence, and Bornt’s 9-month-old baby....

Neiman was forced to watch as Lockett’s accomplice, Shawn Mathis, spent 20 minutes digging a shallow grave in a ditch beside the road. Her friends saw Neiman standing in the ditch and heard a single shot.

Lockett returned to the truck because the gun had jammed. He later said he could hear Neiman pleading, “Oh God, please, please” as he fixed the shotgun. The men could be heard “laughing about how tough Stephanie was” before Lockett shot Neiman a second time.

He ordered Mathis to bury her, despite the fact that Mathis informed him Stephanie was still alive.

A few days after Lockett's execution, a foreign reporter raised the issue with Obama and compared America's use of the death penalty to that of Iran, Saudi Arabia, and China. After conceding that the death penalty might be appropriate in a very “terrible” crime such as “mass killing” or “the killings of children,” Obama went on to denounce the capital punishment generally:

"The application of the death penalty in this country, we have seen significant problems — racial bias, uneven application of the death penalty, you know, situations in which there were individuals on death row who later on were discovered to have been innocent because of exculpatory evidence. And all these, I think, do raise significant questions about how the death penalty is being applied. And this situation in Oklahoma I think just highlights some of the significant problems there.

"So I’ll be discussing with Eric Holder and others, you know — you know, to get me an analysis of what steps have been taken, not just in this particular instance, but more broadly in this area. I think we do have to, as a society, ask ourselves some difficult and profound questions around these issues."

Obama and a White Police Officer's Killing of Black Teenager Michael Brown

On August 14, 2014, Obama addressed the riots that had been raging in recent days in response to the August 9 kiling -- by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri -- of an unarmed 18-year-old black male named Michael Brown in circumstances that were not yet clear. While he called for "unity" and calm, the president also issued a sternly worded reprimand to the police:

"This morning, I received a thorough update on the situation from Attorney General Eric Holder, who’s been following and been in communication with his team. I’ve already tasked the Department of Justice and the FBI to independently investigate the death of Michael Brown, along with local officials on the ground. The Department of Justice is also consulting with local authorities about ways that they can maintain public safety without restricting the right of peaceful protest and while avoiding unnecessary escalation. I made clear to the attorney general that we should do what is necessary to help determine exactly what happened and to see that justice is done....

"Of course, it’s important to remember how this started. We lost a young man, Michael Brown, in heartbreaking and tragic circumstances. He was 18 years old, and his family will never hold Michael in their arms again. And when something like this happens, the local authorities, including the police, have a responsibility to be open and transparent about how they are investigating that death and how they are protecting the people in their communities. There is never an excuse for violence against police or for those who would use this tragedy as a cover for vandalism or looting. There’s also no excuse for police to use excessive force against peaceful protests or to throw protesters in jail for lawfully exercising their First Amendment rights. And here in the United States of America, police should not be bullying or arresting journalists who are just trying to do their jobs and report to the American people on what they see on the ground."

On August 18, Obama said: "In too many communities, too many young men of color are left behind and left as objects to fear. Part of the ongoing challenge of perfecting our union has involved dealing with communities that feel left behind." And in light of the fact that some police in Ferguson were employing tanks and riot gear in order to deal with the looters, Obama stated: "There is no excuse for excessive force by police.... I think it's probably useful for us to review how the funding has gone, how local law enforcement has used grant dollars, to make sure that what they're purchasing [such as military equipment] is stuff that they actually need. There is a big difference between our military and our local law enforcement, and we don't want those lines blurred."

At the annual Congressional Black Caucus Awards Dinner in Washington, DC on September 28, 2014, President Obama said his administration was working to close "the justice gap" between whites and nonwhites. A key consideration, he explained, was not merely "how justice is applied, but also how it is perceived, how it is experienced." Citing the shooting of Michael Brown as well as other incidents, Obama lamented that "too many young men of color feel targeted by law enforcement, guilty of walking while black, or driving while black, judged by stereotypes that fuel fear and resentment and hopelessness." The racial disparities in everything from traffic stops to criminal sentences, said the president, feeds the widespread belief that "the criminal justice system doesn't treat people of all races equally." "That has a corrosive effect," he added, "not just on the black community. It has a corrosive effect on America."

On November 5, 2014 -- the day after Democrats had lost the U.S. Senate in the midterm elections -- Obama met at the White House with protest leaders from Ferguson and urged them to "stay on course" with their activism. Among those with whom he met was Al Sharpton.

On the night of November 24, 2014 -- less than an hour after a Ferguson, Missouri grand jury decided not to indict the police officer who had shot and killed Michael Brown -- Obama delivered a televised address to the nation. Among his remarks were assertions that because "we are a nation built on the rule of law,... we need to accept that this decision was the grand jury’s to make"; that "anyone who protests this decision [should] do so peacefully"; that "our police officers put their lives on the line for us every single day"; and that "we have made enormous progress in race relations over the course of the past several decades." But the bulk of his address contained references to the ongoing inequities allegedly plaguing American society and its criminal-justice system, and the rage spawned by those inequities. For example:

* "There are Americans who agree with [the grand jury decision], and there are Americans who are deeply disappointed, even angry. It’s an understandable reaction."

* "I also appeal to the law enforcement officials in Ferguson and the region to show care and restraint in managing peaceful protests that may occur....  As they do their jobs in the coming days, they need to work with the community, not against the community, to distinguish the handful of people who may use the grand jury’s decision as an excuse for violence. Distinguish them from the vast majority who just want their voices heard around legitimate issues in terms of how communities and law enforcement interact."

* "[W]e need to recognize that the situation in Ferguson speaks to broader challenges that we still face as a nation. The fact is in too many parts of this country a deep distrust exists between law enforcement and communities of color. Some of this is the result of the legacy of racial discrimination in this country.... I’ve instructed Attorney General Holder to work with cities across the country to help build better relations between communities and law enforcement. That means working with law enforcement officials to make sure their ranks are representative of the communities they serve. We know that makes a difference. It means working to train officials so that law enforcement conducts itself in a way that is fair to everybody."

* "[W]e know that there are communities who’ve been able to deal with this in an effective way, but also who are interested in working with this administration and local and state officials to start tackling much-needed criminal justice reform. So, those should be the lessons that we draw from these tragic events. We need to recognize that this is not just an issue for Ferguson. This is an issue for America."

* "[T]here are still problems, and communities of color aren’t just making these problems up. Separating that from this particular decision, there are issues in which the law too often feels as if it is being applied in a discriminatory fashion. I don’t think that’s the norm. I don’t think that’s true for the majority of communities or the vast majority of law enforcement officials. But these are real issues. And we have to lift them up and not deny them or try to tamp them down. What we need to do is understand them and figure out how do we make more progress."

* "[T]hose who are only interested in focusing on the violence and just want the problem to go away need to recognize that we do have work to do here and we shouldn’t try to paper it over. Whenever we do that, the anger may momentarily subside, but over time, it builds up and America isn’t everything that it could be. And I am confident that if we focus our attention on the problem and we look at what has happened in communities around the country effectively, then we can make progress not just in Ferguson but in a lot of other cities and communities around the country."

The following day -- November 25, 2014 -- Obama spoke at Copernicus Community Center in Chicago and again addressed the riots and protests that were taking place not only in Ferguson but throughout the country. Stating that violence was both counterproductive and wrong, he also said that "the frustrations that we have seen are not just about a particular incident" but "have deep roots in many communities of color, who have a sense that our laws are not always being enforced uniformly or fairly"; that "that's an impression that folks have and it's not just made up" but is "rooted in reality"; that it was vital "to have real conversations about how do we change the situation so that there's more trust between law enforcement and some of these communities"; that "I have instructed attorney general Eric Holder not just to investigate what happened in Ferguson, but [to] also identify specific steps we can take together to set up a series of regional meetings focused on building trust in our communities"; that changes were necessary to ensure "that law enforcement is fair and is being applied equally to every person in this country"; and that "if we train police properly, that ... improves policing and makes people feel that the system is fair."

In a primetime address that same day in Chicago, Obama expressed his support for the Ferguson protesters by declaring: “So my message to those people who are constructively moving forward, trying to mobilize, organize and ... I want those folks to know their president is going to work with them.”