The Jason Vassell case, which drew hundreds of people from Amherst and beyond to protest the actions of the Northwest District Attorney’s office (see “The Eve of Instruction,” Feb. 12, 2009), has been concluded. The black UMass student who stabbed two white intruders with a small knife during an altercation that had first given him a broken nose has been sentenced to two and a half years’ pretrial probation. The probation dates to the time he was first charged in February, 2008, so it will end in August if he doesn’t violate it.
That he will seems unlikely. Vassell, a premed student until he left UMass because of the dustup, had been an exemplary young man until the other men, who were not UMass students, barged into his dormitory and pelted him with racial epithets. Both had police records that included allegations that they had harassed minority members. But only one of them was charged, and he was only charged with disorderly conduct (a misdemeanor), while Vassell was charged with aggravated assault and battery with a dangerous weapon.
It was the discrepancy between the charges that spurred townspeople, UMass students and faculty, and others to protest what they saw as injustice in the prosecutors’ treatment of Vassell.
The point was not so much that Vassell had been treated more harshly than the other men just because he was black, but that a subtler form of racial insensitivity was involved—that the prosecutors left out of account that the experience of black people may give rise to strong defensive reactions when they are attacked, while the white men’s police records underscored their tendencies toward racially based aggression. Instead of allowing that Vassell was, rightly or wrongly, in fear for his life, prosecutors at first seemed to take the simple way out by focusing on the knife-as-deadly-weapon aspect of the case. The sentencing by Judge Judd Carhart relieves Vassell of the fear of serving a possible 30 years in prison, but considering the lost time and the trauma the incident caused him, it’s clear that there were no winners in this case.
