The System Labeled Him a Killer: Prakash Churaman's Fight for Freedom
Words by Shivani Parikh
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The System Labeled Him a Killer: Prakash Churaman's Fight for Freedom by Shivani Parikh
The United States’ criminal legal system is predicated on an important constitutional loophole. The Thirteenth Amendment forbade slavery and involuntary servitude, “except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” The institution of policing is derived from slave-catching, so naturally the prison industrial complex today seeks to create, bolster, and legitimize a hidden labor force made up of the most vulnerable and marginalized. The conflation of a racial hierarchy with an expanded definition of who should be disproportionately targeted to fill empty prison cells has meant that in the last century, immigrants of color (namely, those without the social & cultural capital embedded in which types of individuals can benefit from the H-1B skilled workers program) have become exposed to scrutiny and surveillance. Thus, honing into the grassroots campaign to have Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz drop charges against Indo-Guyanese Prakash Churaman, who was arrested on murder charges as a teenager, we must be clear. The apathy to the needs of the urban poor & working class, the ongoing War on Terror that conflates brown skin with the promise of an inherent threat, and the longstanding school-to-prison pipeline has meant that because of the brown color of our skin, South Asian and Indo-Caribbean youth are implicated and criminalized by these systems too.
On December 9, 2014, around 6 a.m., 15-year-old Prakash was woken up by police who entered his basement apartment without a warrant for his arrest. He was handcuffed, transported to the 113th Precinct, and then handcuffed to a wall until his mother arrived. Upon Prakash’s mother’s arrival, she was manipulated by Detective Barry Brown, who has a history of misconduct dating back to 1995, and Detective Daniel Gallagher into signing away Prakash’s right to have an attorney present. This allowed both detectives to coerce Prakash into a false confession.
No DNA evidence was ever found to link Prakash to the crime. He was not charged with murder until after he was forced to provide a false confession. Prakash was then forced to grow up in jail, as he waited three years before his first trial. Judge Kenneth Holder refused to allow Prakash’s defense to have an expert witness on juvenile false confessions testify. After this conviction in his first trial was overturned in 2020, when it was ruled that the defense should have been allowed that expert witness testimony, he was offered a total of two plea deals. He turned down both of them and has maintained his innocence. He awaits the announcement of his second trial date.
I had the privilege of meeting Prakash on a Zoom video call last fall, alongside lawyer & community advocate Aminta Kilawan-Narine and former Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM) organizer Will Depoo (who is a core member of Prakash’s advocacy team). I was invited in my capacity as a board member of Sadhana: Coalition of Progressive Hindus and as a board member of the North American South Asian Law Students Association (NASALSA). I had been hoping to hear directly from him to learn more about what role the two organizations that I was a part of could do to support or amplify his campaign, while keeping with the integrity of his goals. The majority of the call centered on the Queens District Attorney’s South Asian and Indo Caribbean Advisory Council. Many members of this council had reached out to Prakash, but he knew that their intentions in doing so were so that they could avoid being publicly named and called out by his campaign as being disingenuous. While these council’s members claimed to want to help him and advocate for his plight “on the inside,” they were not willing to do what he asked, which was to quit the council entirely and to stop giving the District Attorney the ostensible appearance of being invested in the needs of our community. Aminta, immediately after the call, announced that she had decided to leave the Council in solidarity with Prakash and his family. It was an important reminder that she was the exception in a sociopolitical environment where titles and proximity to people in power can otherwise easily stifle folks’ consciences.
Over 50 politicians have co-signed a letter to D.A. Katz’ office, asking her to drop charges against Prakash. DRUM interrupted the D.A.’s 2021 Diwali celebration to draw attention to his case. The prosecutors complained recently about how the community has been showing up regularly to raise awareness about this injustice regularly at the Queens Criminal Court, especially at the times of a hearing, and that they must stop. As we near the announcement of his trial date, as the movement has been wholly ignored and rejected by the state, the time to act is now.
We know about the collaboration after 9/11 between the NYC Department of Education and the NYPD. We know that South Asians experience violent police brutality (like Sureshbhai Patel and Ejaz Choudry). The conversation about the ironic prevalent opinion that brown immigrants hold about the criminal legal systems in their home countries, which are notoriously corrupt and slow, somehow fizzles into a quiet complacency when we see our own yet again maligned by the same tactics used against our young people here. Learn now about how to join the fight to #FreePrakashChuraman - because we are running out of time.
Credits
Shivani Parikh is a J.D. candidate and Stein Scholar for Public Interest Law & Ethics at Fordham Law School. She is committed to expanding immigrants’ rights, curtailing the War on Terror’s surveillance project, and multi-issue advocacy for our marginalized and disenfranchised Desi families. She is the secretary & advocacy chair for the North American South Asian Law Students Association, a helpline volunteer with Sakhi for South Asian Women, and will be a legal intern with Communities Resist in Brooklyn, NY this summer. She can be found on Twitter @browngirlrising.