The South Shall Be Risible Again!

Update: Some good news for justice and Mychal Bell

Louisiana's 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals, acting on an emergency defense appeal, reversed the aggravated second-degree battery conviction of Mychal Bell, 17, ruling that the youth had been tried improperly as an adult in a case that has raised allegations of unequal justice in the small, mostly white town.
[...]
[Prosecutor] Walters later reduced the charges to aggravated second-degree battery, contending at Bell's trial -- the first case to go to court -- that the tennis shoes Bell was wearing constituted a dangerous weapon.

Walters said in a statement Friday that he intended to appeal the reversal of Bell's conviction to the Louisiana Supreme Court.

Bastard!

Below the graphic are some lowlights from the original post.
Artist's conception of judge and jury
Via Pursuing Holiness we bring you the latest noose:

Racial demons rear heads

JENA, La. -- [...]One morning last September, students arrived at the local high school to find three hangman's nooses dangling from a tree in the courtyard.

The tree was on the side of the campus that, by long-standing tradition, had always been claimed by white students, who make up more than 80 percent of the 460 students. But a few of the school's 85 black students had decided to challenge the accepted state of things and asked school administrators if they, too, could sit beneath the tree's cooling shade.

"Sit wherever you want," school officials told them. The next day, the nooses were hanging from the branches.
[...]
Three white students were quickly identified as being responsible, and the high school principal recommended that they be expelled.
[...]
But Jena's white school superintendent, Roy Breithaupt, ruled that the nooses were just a youthful stunt and suspended the students for three days, angering blacks who felt harsher punishments were justified.

"Adolescents play pranks," said Breithaupt
[...]
But the LaSalle Parish district attorney, Reed Walters, opted to charge six black students with attempted second-degree murder and other offenses, for which they could face a maximum of 100 years in prison if convicted. All six were expelled from school.
[...]
Black teen convicted in beating of white student
[...]
Those charges could lead to a sentence of more than 20 years for Bell
[...]
The five-woman, one-man jury started deliberating around 11 a.m. Thursday and returned around 2 p.m.

Boy, we're gonna give you a fair trial ... and then we'll hang you.



(Cross posted at Vidiotspeak)

Try to love one another right now

Just a few days ago I mentioned the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling here. And now it's suddenly back in the news in a frightening way. From Sunday's LATimes:

BROWN vs. Board of Education, the Supreme Court's landmark declaration that racially segregated public schools were unconstitutional, may be the court's only ruling in the last 200 years that virtually everyone today agrees was "rightly decided." It is simply unimaginable that a president would appoint, or that the Senate would confirm, a court nominee who failed to pay homage to the 1954 decision.

. . . Under Roberts' reinterpretation of Brown, the decision's central message is that government must be strictly "colorblind" because all racial classification is inherently pernicious. In this view, there is no legal or moral difference between a school assignment program (like those at issue in Brown) that enforces racial segregation and others (like Seattle's and Louisville's) that are designed to ensure some measure of integration.

WTF? First, read the whole article. Then worry, and weep. What is the real issue with Brown that would cause the hyper-reactionary Supreme Court to revisit it?

First, take a look at this map:

Yep. Segregation of races was required by law in 17 Red states. While it may have been unintentional for Wikipedia to use red for the rascist states, I really don't think so. Many of those states are still considered red today.

Sometimes the Supreme Court gets it wrong: Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson, Bush v. Gore. Breathtakingly, disastrously wrong. In re: Plessy, the SCOTUS reversed it's infamous decision with Brown. Separate But Equal was banished forever. Or not. Wikipedia goes on:

Brown is often referred to as Brown I, because the following year, 1955, the Court completed its ruling. In this second Brown decision, Brown II, the Warren Court ordered the states' compliance with Brown I "with all deliberate speed." Brown II was argued by Robert L. Carter, who had earlier initiated some of the cases consolidated at the Supreme Court into Brown I. Even so, formal compliance with the provisions of these two cases was not expedited, and in the South most public schools would not be desegregated until about 1970 under the Nixon administration. Nearly twenty years after Brown, school desegregation would come to the court's attention again in two cases involving the use of busing to integrate students across school districts: Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 402 U.S. 1 (1971) and Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717 (1974).

I'm going to go out on a limb here, and drop all the niceties and legal issues. Frame it all you want, Judge Roberts, the reason you want to re-visit Brown has nothing to do with how to implement programs that try to counter segregation and racism. The "colorblind" status you wish to confer to the law will ignore insults and inequities based on color.

Welcome to the world of Judge Roberts, where the law is a process, and people don't matter.

Bastard.