Families of Floyd, Arbery and Wright join calls for justice for SC’s Jamal Sutherland
Standing in the courtyard outside the Charleston courthouse, Amy Sutherland said she had to do it. Then, she screamed.
Pointing up at 9th Circuit Solicitor’s Scarlett Wilson’s office, the grieving mother wailed, “Scarlett! Do the right thing! I can’t take this anymore!”
It had been one year since she buried her son, Jamal Sutherland, after his death inside the Charleston County jail. Friday would have been his 33rd birthday.
But unlike the Black families who surrounded her on Thursday afternoon, Sutherland said she is still waiting for justice for her son.
In an emotional news conference, Sutherland was joined in her grief by relatives of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Daunte Wright.
“My brother said he couldn’t breathe,” said Philonise Floyd, George Floyd’s younger brother. “Jamal Sutherland said he could not breathe. Nobody cared to listen.”
The families all share a painful connection. The deaths of their loved ones would fuel a national reckoning over police accountability and racial justice.
It is a fraternity, they said, that no family wants to be a part of.
“At some point, this has to stop,” George Floyd’s nephew, Brandon Williams said of Black people dying at the hands of law enforcement officers who took an oath to protect and serve. “But until then, you will see us fighting on the front line.”
The families took turns at the microphone sharing the injustice they saw in the death of their loved ones and in Sutherland’s death inside the Charleston County jail.
The father of Ahmaud Arbery, whose 25-year-old son was gunned down by three white men as he was jogging on a Sunday afternoon in Brunswick, Ga., began by saying he knew the Sutherland family’s pain.
“It’s another sad day in this world because we’re losing our children and it hurts, and it hurts every day you wake up,” Marcus Arbery said.
The three men who chased and killed Arbery were sentenced last week to life in prison after a jury convicted them of murder. They also face federal hate crime charges.
All of the families who stood in solidarity with the Sutherland family on Thursday are represented by prominent civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who on Thursday pledged to pursue “every possible legal remedy” to get justice in Sutherland’s jail death.
Crump, a Florida-based civil rights attorney, has become the go-to lawyer for the families of Black people killed by police and vigilantes. He helped secure a record-breaking $27 million settlement for the family of George Floyd.
Crump has been working with Columbia attorney Carl Solomon on the Sutherland case.
“Look at George Floyd being killed, and then look at Jamal Sutherland being killed, and ask yourself what’s the difference?” Crump said, saying he sees the greatest similarities between the two cases. “That’s why these families came from a thousand miles away, to say that an injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
Sutherland, a 31-year-old Black man with a history of mental illness, died inside the Charleston County jail on Jan. 5, 2021, after two deputies repeatedly stunned him with Tasers and kneeled on his back until he stopped breathing.
Before he was booked into the Al Cannon Detention Center, Sutherland had been a patient at Palmetto Lowcountry Behavioral Health Center, a mental health facility where Sutherland was receiving care for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
He was arrested on Jan. 4 by North Charleston Police after an alleged fight broke out between patients and staff at the facility.
At the time of his death, deputies were trying to forcibly remove Sutherland from his cell for a scheduled bond hearing that legal experts say he was not legally required to attend.
The Sutherland family has maintained they were not notified of their son’s arrest at Palmetto Behavioral Health and dispute allegations surrounding the altercation at the mental health facility.
In footage released by the Charleston County Sheriff’s Office, which is in charge of the jail, Sutherland can be heard saying, “I can’t breathe” as he lies face-down while a deputy presses their knee into his back for more than two minutes.
“That immediately struck a nerve,” Williams said of the Sutherland case, connecting that detail to when he watched video footage of his uncle George Floyd crying out, “I can’t breathe” more than 20 times as a Minneapolis police officer pressed his knee into his neck for more than nine minutes.
“We’ve had a lot of days in the courtroom, and I’ve become familiar with a lot of terms. And the one term that I remember is ‘in your custody is in your care,’” Williams said. “Jamal Sutherland was in custody but nobody cared for him. He had a mental health crisis. He didn’t need to be Tased, he needed help. They needed to deescalate the situation but instead they murdered a man who needed help.”
At first, details surrounding Sutherland’s death were unknown, which prompted community outcry and demands for transparency.
Facing public pressure, Charleston County Sheriff Kristin Graziano released hours of graphic footage four months after Sutherland’s death that showed what happened. She also fired the deputies involved in Sutherland’s death: Charleston County Detention Center Sgt. Lindsay Fickett and detention Deputy Brian Houle.
The public dissemination of those videos led to swift protests in Charleston, where community leaders compared his death to the police killing of George Floyd while also calling for changes to how people with mental illness are treated while in custody.
Charleston County in May agreed to pay a $10 million settlement to Sutherland’s family.
But after reviewing the facts of the case, 9th Circuit Solicitor Scarlett Wilson announced in July that she would not bring criminal charges against the deputies who used physical force against Sutherland shortly before he died.
The Charleston County Coroner’s determined Sutherland died of an abnormal heart rhythm, also known as a cardiac dysrhythmia.
Wilson called the deputies’ actions against Sutherland “damning,” but said she couldn’t prove the guards intended to kill Sutherland. She said the jail employees were merely following their training, which a national use of force expert said had fostered a “militaristic culture” at the jail.
At that summer press conference, Wilson also stressed that Sutherland died through no fault of his own.
“The heartbreaking fact is that Mr. Sutherland’s death was entirely avoidable,” Wilson said. “With better treatment, care and concern by all the institutions involved, Jamal Sutherland would not have died the way he did on January 5.”
Since Wilson’s decision, the Sutherland family and their legal team has continued to publicly call on Wilson to reconsider the case.
At Thursday’s press conference, Crump noted that prosecutors in Georgia initially declined to pursue charges in Ahmaud Arbery’s death and, at one point, had ruled his death a “justifiable homicide.”
“We got Jamal Sutherland tortured to death on video, and the prosecutor chooses not to do her job for which she was elected. And the Sutherlands don’t get their chance to hear a jury listen to the evidence and come back and render a verdict that we believe will be guilty, guilty, guilty,” Crump said. “It don’t take rocket scientists. All you gotta do is use your eyes.”
In a statement released by her office Thursday evening, Wilson said she and an expert met on July 26 with Amy Sutherland and the family’s attorneys about her decision not to prosecute. But during that meeting, Wilson said it “became apparent from her reaction and pejorative response that Mrs. Sutherland could no longer have a rational conversation with me or my office.”
After a Sutherland family representative reached out about a meeting in December 2021, Wilson said she told them that she did not think a meeting would be productive and told them she thought a meeting would not be productive and would likely lead to “the family’s false hope as I stand firm in my decision.”
“I encouraged them to seek a review,” Wilson said. “I appreciate the Sutherlands’ perseverance and respect their resolve. After today’s event, I am more convinced that a meeting would not be in anyone’s best interest.”
Wilson reiterated in her statement that she provided her report on the Sutherland case to the public, along with the Department of Justice and the state Attorney General.
“While I stand by my decision, I welcome the review of other prosecutors,” Wilson said.
Solomon, the Columbia attorney who began representing the Sutherland family with Crump in the fall, said during the press conference that there are protocols in South Carolina that allow for cases to be reviewed whenever a solicitor decides they cannot do the job either by conflict or by a decision being made.
“Scarlett Wilson has indicated that she is asked the Attorney General (Alan Wilson) to review this matter. We have written a letter. We have sent an email. We’re going to go to the front door: Mr. Wilson, will you look at this case and make a decision on bringing charges?’” Solomon said in a direct plea to the state’s chief prosecutor.
“It is time to do the work,” Solomon said. “This will not go away.”
The pain of losing her child will not go away either, Amy Sutherland said. As she stood at the microphone, Sutherland ran through a list of all the things Jamal loved to do on his birthday.
In the morning, he would wake up and open his cards, count his money and beg his mom to take him to the mall. For his birthday lunch and dinner, he wanted to go to Red Lobster.
“I miss not being able to buy him presents. I miss my son,” she said, as her youngest son, Jamar, wiped away tears.
At the end of the press conference, all of the families gathered around one another and sang “Happy Birthday” to Jamal Sutherland.
Then, they let go of their black and silver balloons, watching them float upward, past the solicitor’s office window and toward the heavens.
This story was originally published January 13, 2022 at 2:26 PM.
