Ben Crump Winning the - Florida State University College of Law

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FSU LAW ■ SPRING 2006
against the Department of Juvenile Justice
and the Bay County Sheriff’s Department,
which ran the camp. The camp’s
security cameras captured the incident on
videotape. Though the camp was forced
to make the videotape public in February,
offi cials there denied the guards had
anything to do with Anderson’s death.
The Bay County medical examiner said
that same month that the boy died from
sickle-cell trait. A second autopsy released
in early May, however, concluded that
Anderson died from suffocation when
the guards forced ammonia up his nose
while covering his mouth. By mid-May,
the family still was waiting for arrests to
be made.
The Martin Lee Anderson case—and
similar wrongful death cases involving
law enforcement and minorities—gives
Crump the opportunity to practice the
kind of law and seek the justice he is
passionate about. Many of his colleagues
in the legal profession, he said, see those
types of cases as no-win and won’t touch
them.
“I would dare to say that 10 other
law fi rms would have turned the Martin
Lee Anderson case down,” Crump said.
“It wasn’t until the video was discovered
that it became such a good case. Before
that, you only have the innuendo of a
little black boy being killed by the police
suspiciously and all the law enforcement
offi cials in Bay County saying Martin was
being uncooperative.”
The Anderson story continues to grab
almost daily headlines in the national
media and has attracted support from
prominent civil rights leaders, the attention
of Florida’s governor and legislature
and the astonishment and ire of the public.
“People are so passionate about this
because you aren’t supposed to be able to
kill someone, lie about it and not be held
accountable,” said Crump, who has been
aggressive in his efforts to keep the story in
the forefront of the public conscience.
Those efforts have included Crump’s
4
advising Florida A & M and Florida State
University students who in April staged a
sit-in at the governor’s offi ce and a march
to the Old Capitol. Led by Sharpton, the
Reverend Jesse Jackson, Anderson’s parents
and Parks and Crump, the rally drew
more than 2,000 protesters demanding
arrests in the case.
Crump knows how to apply steady
pressure to the powers that be and his
tactics have paid off. Though they are still
waiting for an arrest, the family, whom
Crump has accompanied to numerous
press conferences, has succeeded in getting
what they have wanted—from the release
of the videotape and the shutting down of
the boot camp (followed by the closing of
all the state’s boot camps) to the resignation
of the FDLE chief, whose objectivity
was called in to question after his e-mails
informing the Bay County sheriff of the
next steps of the investigation surfaced.
Both Jackson and Sharpton said they
were impressed by Crump’s ability to keep
the story on the front pages of national
newspapers and on primetime newscasts.
“Not only is Ben Crump bringing this to
court, he has brought it to the court of
public opinion,” said Jackson. “What he
is doing will affect politics, behaviors and
jurors. He and his group are organizing
public opinion very effectively.” Crump
and the family appeared on “Anderson
Cooper 360,” “The O’Reilly Factor” and
“Good Morning America” and have invitations
to appear on “The Oprah Winfrey
Show” and “The View.”
Said Crump: “No way would Martin’s
parents have had an audience with Governor
Bush if we weren’t working this case
every day, every week, trying to make it
an issue so that people won’t try to see it as
an old story or sweep it under the rug and
say the more time that goes by, the more
irrelevant it becomes.”
Crump and Anderson’s parents had an
opportunity to express their frustration
with the events following the aftermath
of the teenager’s death when the governor
invited them to his offi ce the day before
the march.
“I said, ‘Governor Bush, the problem is
that in our society when people have this
much evidence on them, nobody should
have to wait this long to have an arrest
made. It almost suggests to all the citizens
of Florida that if you have a badge and a
gun, that you are above the law.’
“As I was talking with the governor,”
Crump said, “I thought, ‘Wow, it was a
very powerful demonstration of that whole
law school process going the whole way.’
That’s why you go to law school: to try to
get justice for the least of us. That’s exactly
why I went to law school.”
‘The Statistics Were
Against Me’
Crump spent his early childhood in rural
North Carolina. His mother supported
her three sons by working in the local
Converse shoe factory, making shoes she
could not afford to buy for her children.
At the start of high school, he moved to
Fort Lauderdale to live with his father, a
math teacher, and witnessed many friends’
futures end tragically on the streets.
“The statistics were against me the
whole way of ever getting out of the projects,
of ever becoming a lawyer, of ever
becoming someone who was considered an
asset to society and a productive citizen,”
he said. “Statistics were, of course, more
slanted to my dropping out of school or
winding up in jail. I was no different
from those other little boys who grew
up in my community and for whatever
reason would not be able to overcome the
statistics.
“I honestly believe that if it were not
for the strong women in my life who
wouldn’t let me stray, I’d have ended up
like they did. But I had a strong mother,
Helen, and a strong praying grandmother,
Ma Mittie, who instilled in me a will to
try to do something with my life. When
those street lights came on, I’d better be in
that house. I knew when I got home from