Case number: 87-447

Source Material

Edition of 25
72 pages (Risograph print w/ burgundy ink)
4 gold-colored steel paper clips
1 gold-colored steel staple
1 tab folder w/ sticker

A document in five sections: Conclusions, Petition, Discrimination, Forensics and Inheritance. Aggravated accounts. Papers making sense of a violent crime show signs of systemic racism. A murder and a death sentence. Dated forensic analyses. I am piecing together my family history and its involvement in this system. My mother was the assistant prosecutor. She made the closing statement and helped select the jury. Her actions were petitioned along with the verdict. An attempt to make orderly decisions about a violence creates a paper trail of disorder, one that is enacting violence itself. Found documents surrounding a grisly murder: court transcripts, letters, petitions, forensic evidence, newspaper clips, scans of photographs. Life in the hands of bureaucrats; their correspondences on record. My mother's name in print, reading a script. Her last major case; pregnant during the trial. Speaking for the victim, Mary Acoff. It happened on Highland Avenue. 1985. Red lines everywhere. The man she sentenced to death shares my birthday. This is one take on the true crime novel. To satisfy a morbid curiosity regarding the banal history of American violence. An arrangement of piecemeal evidence.

Interactions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies
(correction: year in statement is 1985, not 1987)

Readings:

National Race and Pedagogy Conference at the University of Puget Sound (Tacoma, September 2018)

LACA presents Institutional Papers at SF Art Book Fair (San Francisco, July 2017)

LACA presents Institutional Papers at Wendy's Subway (New York, October 2017)

UCLA Department of Information Studies Kenneth Karmiole Symposium in Archival Studies: [dis]memory, [mis]representation & [re]figuring the archival lens: A Symposium on Visual and Visualizing Archives (Los Angeles, January 2018)

Collections:

Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art
Los Angeles Contemporary Archive
Wendy's Subway (NYC)
The Getty Research Institute