Normally, when 15-year-old Eva Goodman participated in summer programming run by Greening of Detroit, a local environmental nonprofit, she did active work like planting trees around the city. But last week, her youth group went on a field trip to Detroit’s 36th District Court. The group planned for attendees to speak with a judge and observe a real trial. And while Judge Kenneth King addressed the young people, Eva fell asleep.
King, who presides over the 36th District’s criminal division, responded to the tired teen with threats. “You fall asleep in my courtroom one more time, I’m gonna put you in the back,” he said. “Understood?”
Eva inadvertently dozed off again a few minutes later. At this point, King began to berate her. “You sleep at home in your bed, not in court,” he said. “And quite frankly, I don’t like your attitude.” Eva does not currently have a permanent residence; her mother says they “have to bounce around” right now, and they “got in kind of late” on the night before the field trip.
Angered by the poverty he perceived as disrespect, King ordered court staff to take Eva into custody. Eva was made to undress and change into one of the jail’s green jumpsuits, and was handcuffed. Then, King pantomimed a court hearing, complete with an attorney assigned to act as Eva’s faux-representation. And he asked her peers for a show of hands on whether Eva should spend time in jail. “I’m thinking maybe she needs to go to the juvenile detention facility,” King said. “You do understand we have a jail for kids.”
Most of Eva’s peers voted for King to let her go. King later said he “probably” was not really going to jail the teen, but he “probably” could have done so.
Clip via YouTube
A video of the incident went viral and prompted considerable condemnation. But King has stood by the actions and basically characterized the traumatizing incident as a form of tough love, saying, “I’ll do whatever needs to be done to reach these kids and make sure that they don’t end up in front of me.” He went on, “I wanted to get through to her, show how serious this is and how you are to conduct yourself inside of a courtroom.” King later contacted Eva’s family and offered to help “mentor” her. (They declined.)
King also clarified to reporters that the discipline he meted out wasn’t really a consequence of Eva’s tiredness, which is “not too big of a deal” since attorneys have fallen asleep in his courtroom, too. Rather, King publicly humiliated the teenager because he thought she had bad vibes: Ordering a kid who committed no crime into lockup is “not something that normally happens,” he said, “but I felt compelled to do it because I didn’t like the child’s attitude.” King claimed that he had not “been disrespected like that in a very long time,” and he was “disturbed” by the teen’s “whole attitude and her whole disposition.”
Paradoxically, Eva’s shocking story is also depressingly banal. A powerful man punished a girl he thought was insufficiently deferential—what a surprise. A judge saw someone in his courtroom as disposable, and jail as the place where one disposes of problems—groundbreaking. The legal system was the means by which poor people were put in their presumed place—how unprecedented. Handcuffing and threatening a kid with jail time because their sleepiness rubbed you wrong is an absurd abuse of power. But beneath the outrageousness of the particular details of this story lies the common, everyday brutality of a legal system that has never met a problem a cage couldn’t fix.
King’s views aren’t universal: The court’s chief judge, William McConico, said he was “dismayed” by the video, and that Judge King has been suspended pending completion of “sensitivity training.” McConico also emphasized that King’s actions were improper regardless of Eva’s current residence: “Whether the young lady was homeless or whether she lives in a mansion, she should not have been treated that way at 36th District Court.” For his abuses of power, King got a slap on the wrist; for being sleepy, Eva got handcuffs.
In a roundabout way, the group’s trip accomplished its objective. The point of the trip was for the youths to learn about what courts do. King’s treatment of Eva taught them all too well.
