Overview

Guilty When Black is the poignant, gut-wrenching story of a young African American woman, Miashah Moses, who, through unrelenting media attention and a rush to judgment by the DA, was charged with second-degree murder in the fiery deaths of her two small nieces, Noni (4) and Nylah (18 months) when she fed them lunch and left for eight minutes to empty the trash. While she was gone, the faulty stove caught fire, a not uncommon occurrence in the low-income apartments, according the electrical contractors. The book's four-part story offers a rare glimpse into the unique challenges faced by minority and marginalized women in Oklahoma, a state with the highest rate of female incarceration in the nation. Miashah's plight is intertwined with vivid stories of five incarcerated women, the rise of one judge and fall of another, and the landmark exoneration of three black men wrongfully sentenced for crimes they did not commit. The non-fiction book is prefaced with a gripping account of the Tulsa 1921 Race Massacre, the largest slaughter of African Americans in U.S. history that left the city's affluent Greenwood district, known as the ""Black Wall Street,"" burned to the ground.

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9781952320583

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Reviews

A Black woman gets trampled by Oklahoma's criminal justice system in this expose. Mersch makes Moses' saga into a crackerjack legal narrative that has courtroom drama and intricate but lucid forensic analysis. There are sharply observed characters, including Moses' fiercely protective mother, Chrisandria; the vindictive district attorney who viewed the defendant as a symbol of moral degeneracy; and the bullying, narcissistic judge who told Moses she had a 10-day window to retract her guilty plea but then denied her withdrawal petition. There's considerable mayhem in the book ( She watched horrified as he fell, twisting and turning in the air, screaming as he descended, his arms flailing as he hurtled in a free fall onto the roof of the eight-story parking garage 17 stories below, the author writes of a woman who denied pushing her husband to his death but wound up in Mabel Bassett anyway). The violence and plenty of punchy, if sometimes purplish, prose- If you're in the wrong place at the wrong time, the sticky fingers of the law will suck you in like a Venus fly trap -capture the ruinous twists of fate that bedevil the author's subjects. Through Moses and her family, Mersch maps society's very uneven playing field: the benefit of the doubt and lenient sentencing that White defendants receive for actions similar to Moses'; the poverty that puts Black people more often in harm's way; the fines, fees, and court costs that saddle them with crippling debts for even trivial misdemeanors; the permanent stain a criminal record puts on a resume. The result is a troubling look at justice that is anything but colorblind. A searing portrait of the blight of systemic bias and disadvantage in Black people's lives. Kirkus Reviews Guilty When Black is a realistic look at how unfair the criminal justice system can be to women, especially to women belonging to ethnic minority groups. This deep non-fiction dive into the ethical failure of the justice system is written by Carol Mersh, author and journalist, and follows the court trials and tribulations of Miashah Moses, an African American woman charged with child neglect when her two nieces were trapped in her burning apartment. Though comments over the faulty conditions of the apartment complex itself were raised, Miashah and her family became victims of the corrupt court system. Also included in this book are short biographies of other people that fell victim to unjust justice, and it also details the history of the Tulsa Race Massacre. This book brings to the spotlight the ways in which the justice system set in place to protect us can actually be the very thing we need protection from. -Reader18 OnlineBookClub.org As a nonfiction expert, Mersch uses her mastery of journalistic storytelling to craft an authentic and compelling piece based on five years of painstaking research and interviews. I particularly enjoyed the court battle at the end of Part 2, a series of climactic scenes that easily rival most legal thrillers. I also marveled at the author's ability to combine descriptive sentences with beautifully haunting prose: Nearly a century later, the horror still runs silently through the streets of Tulsa and the halls of the Oklahoma judicial system. The nooses have long since left the trees, but their specters hang like ghosts in the halls of justice. -Tomah OnlineBookClub.org

A Black woman gets trampled by Oklahoma's criminal justice system in this expose. Journalist Mersch tells the story of Miashah Moses, a 23-year-old African American woman in Tulsa. In 2013, Moses left her two nieces, 4-year-old Noni and 18-month-old Nylah, alone in their apartment for about eight minutes while she took out the garbage. During that time, a fire broke out and killed the girls. The tragedy sparked a Kafkaesque criminal case against the distraught Moses. Held in jail for years on an unpayable $500,000 bond, she was charged at one point with second-degree murder by prosecutors who argued that she willfully neglected the girls by fleeing the apartment to buy drugs and started the fire by leaving a pan of grease heating on the stove. The case was weak: The supposed drug dealer testified that Moses was not the woman he met that day, and copious evidence surfaced that the building's faulty wiring had caused similar fires. But Moses' pro bono attorney never told her about the defective wiring and instead pressured her into a plea bargain and a 15-year sentence in Mabel Bassett women's prison, a squalid place. Mersch braids into the woman's travails the experiences of other female inmates and of Moses' extended family, including a mentally disturbed cousin who was murdered in prison after killing his father, and an uncle found drowned under suspicious circumstances that the police never investigated. The author sets these misfortunes against a history of racial injustice in Tulsa dating back to the 1921 pogrom in which White mobs killed hundreds of Black residents and including a recent scandal in which the city's police fabricated evidence against dozens of defendants. Mersch makes Moses' saga into a crackerjack legal narrative that has courtroom drama and intricate but lucid forensic analysis. There are sharply observed characters, including Moses' fiercely protective mother, Chrisandria; the vindictive district attorney who viewed the defendant as a symbol of moral degeneracy; and the bullying, narcissistic judge who told Moses she had a 10-day window to retract her guilty plea but then denied her withdrawal petition. There's considerable mayhem in the book ( She watched horrified as he fell, twisting and turning in the air, screaming as he descended, his arms flailing as he hurtled in a free fall onto the roof of the eight-story parking garage 17 stories below, the author writes of a woman who denied pushing her husband to his death but wound up in Mabel Bassett anyway). The violence and plenty of punchy, if sometimes purplish, prose- If you're in the wrong place at the wrong time, the sticky fingers of the law will suck you in like a Venus fly trap -capture the ruinous twists of fate that bedevil the author's subjects. Through Moses and her family, Mersch maps society's very uneven playing field: the benefit of the doubt and lenient sentencing that White defendants receive for actions similar to Moses'; the poverty that puts Black people more often in harm's way; the fines, fees, and court costs that saddle them with crippling debts for even trivial misdemeanors; the permanent stain a criminal record puts on a resume. The result is a troubling look at justice that is anything but colorblind. A searing portrait of the blight of systemic bias and disadvantage in Black people's lives. Kirkus Reviews

Author Information

Carol Mersch is an Oklahoma author and journalist specializing in narrative non-fiction. She has published eight books and numerous articles which she authored and co-compiled with others in areas of space exploration, law enforcement, and spirituality. She subsequently left the corporate world to form ProvidenceWorks LLC, a business enterprise for developing articles and books ""that make a difference."" In 2011-2018 she was featured on Houston Fox26, Tulsa ABC NewsOn6, BBC World Radio, Dallas CBS Radio KRLD, MSNBC, CNN Faith, and two magazines in Europe, Spaceflight Magazine and Sorted-a Christian men's magazine-for her research into the first Lunar Bible covered in her book The Apostles of Apollo. The historic Bibles carried to the moon and their heirship have been featured by the Associated Press, the Houston Chronicle, the Baytown Sun, MSNBC, Fox News, CNN Belief, and Al Jazeera ""America Tonight"" (Sept 2015). For more information see www.carolmersch.com.

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