Is this a nonviolent arena?

In the broader nonviolent activist community, honest minds differ about engaging in the legal system. Some believe it is simply a violent subsystem of the violent war system.

They have a point. Structural violence within the legal system is quite active at several levels. 

First, it costs a great deal of money to get adequate legal representation--and the public defenders, sorry, don't count for much in most cases. Why? Not only are they generally paid far less than lawyers on the private side, they are even paid less than prosecutors in most cases, and, just to bury this point completely, public appointment of prosecutors vastly outdoes appointment of their public counterparts, the defense of those who cannot afford the $multi-hundreds per billable hour of good lawyers. Expecting great lawyers to volunteer--that is, offer their services pro bono--is both unrealistic and a labor equity issue.

Second, there many systemic biases that generally result in a higher percentage of people of color arrested and charged. In many studies, for instance, racial profiling is proven and, as logic dictates, if a higher percent of a certain demographic is contacted by law enforcement, a greater percent of that population is exposed to examination, observation, and interrogation. If there is a bag of marijuana on the back seat of two drivers and a white person isn't pulled over, but a black person is, the skewed results are painfully obvious. 

The anecdotal examples of racism in American policing are familiar to most, directly to most BIPOC Americans and even internationally when shocking stories are published in world press. For instance, an account was published in Eastern Eye UK of a Seattle police officer speeding at 119 mph hitting a 23-year-old Indian student, Jaahnavi Kandula, killing her and resulting in another officer laughing about it and saying she wasn't worth much.[1]

Far more insidious is the "I was in fear for my life" response offered by police as a qualified immunity defense when they kill someone, and the fear of a black person seems to overshadow all other factors for many white officers, or at least a higher percent of them who are investigated after they kill someone--and black people remain a much more likely target for police violence in America.[2] For many years this was almost a routinely successful way for them to avoid indictment in many, if not most, jurisdictions in the US, and it's still a rarity for a white police officer to be charged in the harm or death of a person of color, almost irrespective of the evidence. 

On the civil side of the law, a BIPOC plaintiff suing a white-majority city government for claims of police violence or almost any other claim has an uphill battle steeper than a white plaintiff in many cases. 

So, in these ways and more, yes, the legal system in the US is one featuring a great deal of structural violence. 

There are also those in the religious and some schools of philosophy that not only understand the structural violence of the US legal system but also simply are not interested in the legal structures at all, preferring to only speak from that religious, spiritual, or philosophical stance when and where they feel called to do so. This is of course the absolute theoretical right of each person to speak when they wish about what they want when they want. That right doesn't exist at all in the legal system, an adversarial system in which the object of the lawyers is to try to tell their side of the story and shut down the story the opposing side wishes to tell. This is, of course, the opposite of both free speech and of any sort of mediation or conflict transformation. A mediator is focused on eliciting all stories from all parties and a lawyer is not. 

For all these reasons and more, the law on both the criminal and civil sides is not a nonviolent institution and those who abjure participation have all these solid points and more. 

The counter-argument is plain for those who wish to practice strategic nonviolence; if things were fair we wouldn't need to offer nonviolent resistance in the first place. We will do our best even under plainly oppressive and unfair conditions in the hopes that we can achieve the occasional recognition by a jury that we are doing the right thing.

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[1] Vivek Mishra. (July 18, 2024 Thursday). US cop who said Indian student killed had limited value fired. Eastern Eye UK. https://advance-lexis-com.proxy.lib.pdx.edu/api/document?collection=news&id=urn:contentItem:6CH8-SY31-JBM6-H0MD-00000-00&context=1519360.

[2] Targeted News Service. (October 29, 2020 Thursday). University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine: Fatal Police Shootings Among Black Americans Remain High, Unchanged Since 2015. Targeted News Service. https://advance-lexis-com.proxy.lib.pdx.edu/api/document?collection=news&id=urn:contentItem:615P-D0G1-DYG2-R3MS-00000-00&context=1519360.