Jena 6 Update

CenLamar at The Daily Kingfish has a good post – The Jena Six: A Compendium. It’s practically a Jena Six carnival – lots of great links. Ryan at TDK has also posted on the Jena Six, and has some other excellent local posts. While I am very pleased that this story is out there in the national arena, I’m even more happy that locals are up in arms about it. It’s not just a matter of enforcing the law fairly, although obviously that is critically important. It’s also important to make it clear to our fellow Louisianians that this type of behavior is not acceptable. We can’t legislate emotions and I don’t want to try. But I’m very much in favor of social pressure to get people to reflect on their feelings and behavior. People can think what they want, as long as they obey the law, and legal pressure can at least prevent the actions of racism. But a change of heart is a permanent solution to the problem of racism, and social pressure can sometimes provoke that.

Nola.com has a AP report – Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton plan visits supporting black youths.

The Town Talk has quotes from the protests – What was said in Jena on Tuesday.

Caseptla Bailey, of Jena, mother of “Jena Six” defendant Robert Bailey Jr.

“When things happen like that, children will fuss and fight, but they will come back and grow up and meet each other and play again. But when adults come with hearts of hatred, it will bring this, and this is where we are now. I just think the only way it will come out is when we come and reason with each other and really look at the whole thing. Without cooperation and without sitting and talking to each other, nothing will be solved.”

And this Town Talk article is a little older, but I wanted to take the time to consider it thoroughly before posting about it. I haven’t seen it linked once on the sinestrosphere. Doesn’t fit the narrative, I guess. But I’ve always contended that aspects of the case were hyped, at the same time that I’ve acknowledged (and complained shrieked loudly about) the injustice which is going on in LaSalle Parish. I’m taking the source of the article, US Attorney Donald Washington, with a whole shaker of salt, so this is a partial fisking:

He spent much of his time during last week’s Department of Justice education forum helping to clear up some of the “misinformation flying about.” He also focused on some of the civil rights laws those in the community wanted to learn more about.

I don’t find him a credible source on “misinformation.” As a general rule, I give the preponderance of personal accounts and local news more credence than I give outsiders. It doesn’t help that I’m predisposed to dislike Washington anyway because of his disingenuous comments about how to determine whether LaSalle DA Reed Walters is guilty of selective prosecution.

Washington said that during his investigation he looked through a number of pictures of the community at events such as football games. He said you often can read a community’s unity through pictures.

“I didn’t see from the pictures a divided community,” he said.

Well, that was helpful! Okay, black folk of Jena, simmah down now! There’s your place, get in it. Everybody else, shut up and go home. Nothing to worry about here, based on those photos Washington reviewed. Of course, both black and white locals disagree.

White pastor Eddie Thompson wrote, “Here in the piney woods of central Louisiana, where some gentle, old, Christian, white women still call graying black men “boy” and some angry, young, Christian, black teens attack pizza delivery trucks that would dare enter their neighborhood, racism and bigotry are such a part of life that most of the citizens do not even recognize it. Cross Highway127 just south of Jena and you enter two different worlds, separated by class and race. If we as Christians face powers, principalities, and rulers of darkness in high places it is certain that part of the spiritual wickedness arrayed against the citizens of LaSalle Parish is hatred born of racism.”

“There’s no doubt about it — whites and blacks are treated differently here,” said Melvin Worthington, who was the only school board member to vote against expelling the six black students charged in the beating case. “The white kids should have gotten more punishment for hanging those nooses. If they had, all the stuff that followed could have been avoided.”

But what do they know? They just live there. Moving on…

LaSalle Parish School Board member Billy Fowler said Monday that he thinks all of the media attention, and in some cases inaccuracies about the case, have painted LaSalle Parish District Attorney Reed Walters “into a corner.”

Fowler said that the boys would have received much lighter charges without all the attention, although the only attention on the case before the charges were bumped from battery to attempted murder was from local media including The Town Talk and The Jena Times.

“I don’t know what (Walters’) thinking, but I’m going to tell you he can’t be resting well at night,” Fowler said of Walters.

Someone, somewhere – please help me locate what part of the United States judicial system permits harsher penalties due to publicity. I don’t care what corner Reed Walters was painted into. As a state official and an officer of the court, he has duties to perform, and he should perform them without regard to race or social issues. He has been invested with authority by the state and to whom much is given, much is expected – or should be. If he’s embarrassed by this case, then that’s hopeful for his future development as a human being and I’m glad for him. But as the article points out, this is a disingenuous argument as well – the attention came after the attempted murder charges, not before. Battery charges for a high school fight are not newsworthy. It’s a bit extreme, but overall it’s a dog bites man story. Attempted murder charges, on the other hand, are very much a man bites dog story and it’s not surprising that the media reported it.

You have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the district attorney decided to treat one group of people different than another, which is hard to prove, Washington said. He said he would have to have proof of Walters’ intentions, such as a record of Walters’ spoken words or somewhere that he had written that intention down.

I’ve already fisked that concept.

Although students have claimed there was a “peaceful protest” at the tree following the noose incident, Washington said he could find no proof of that claim. As opposed to a peaceful response, Jena police officers were called to the school to respond to a number of fights — white on black and black on white — in the days after the noose incident, Washington said.

And yet it’s been reported in other places that the assembly where DA Reed Walters threatened the black students occurred the same day as the protest. As to fights on subsequent days – which have not been reported before now – I’d be very interested to know just how many criminal charges were filed for those fights. I think we all would.

Fair Barn incident
On Dec. 1, there was a private, invitation-only birthday party at the Fair Barn. Around 11 p.m., five black students tried to come into the party but were told by a woman that they weren’t allowed inside without an invitation. The boys persisted, saying they had friends inside. A white man then jumped in front of the woman, and a fight started.

A group broke the two up, and the woman asked the white man, not a student, and the black students to leave the party. Once outside, another fight started between a group of white men, not students, and the black students. Police were called, and a white man was arrested. He pleaded guilty to simple battery.

Even though there were reports of one of the black students receiving injuries that required medical attention, there is no record of that.

This is in complete opposition to previous reports, and the two are so different they can’t be reconciled. Someone is lying.

Gotta Go incident
On Dec. 2, there was an encounter at the Gotta Go convenience store that appears to have been spurred by the Friday night fight. The white man, not a student, gave one version of the story, while the three black students gave another. Walters based his charges on the statement from the witness and neither of the sides involved, and charged one of the black students with battery and theft.

The white man ran into the black students, something was said indicating they were going to fight, so the white man turned and ran back to his truck to get his firearm — a regular-barreled shotgun with a pistol grip. One of the black students began to wrestle the white man for his gun, and the other students jumped in to help.

It is reasonable to assume, Washington said, that the two students who jumped in to help and the white man presumed a threat.

Although there were reports of the black students calling the police, there was no report from either the Sheriff’s Office or Police Department.

I’d be interested to know why this law abiding white guy didn’t run into the store to seek help, or perhaps lock himself in his truck and call the police on his cell phone. I’m a gun owner and a big believer in self defense. But not in pulling a gun on people who are unarmed, especially when other options are available.

No report from the Sheriff’s office… how convenient! It’s as convenient as something that happened over a year ago to a friend of mine – her schoolteacher daughter was illegally arrested because the mother of one of her students was mad at her, and worked in the police department as a clerk. She was arrested at school in front of her students, taken away in a police car, brought to the station, and released without being booked. There was no paperwork at the police station for that little shenanigan either. (The city she lived in paid for the fiasco, too, a year later.) No thinking person will rule out the possibility that the Jena police were, shall we say, careless with the evidence that the students called the police. Yes, that’s pure speculation which proves nothing and never will. But given all the other factors in the story, it would be foolhardy to not consider the possibility.

The Jena High incident
Out of the 40-plus statements, including those from the black students and some of the students charged in the fight, none suggested that the Dec. 4 incident was imminently caused by the nooses, although many now are claiming that one could not have come without the other. There was no mention of the nooses at all in any of the statements, Washington said.

The other day I was outside in the yard at about noon. I commented to a friend how hot it was. (Granted, it’s not scintillating conversation, but then my brain was melting from the heat…) Oddly enough, she didn’t reply that the reason it was so hot was because it was high noon in N’awlins in July. It was just kind of understood. You can report on the effect of something without mentioning the root cause. Had someone fully deposed the people who gave those 40-plus statements, I bet they would have mentioned something along the lines that Justin Barker’s little friends going largely unpunished for hanging the nooses gave white teens at the school a feeling of impunity to call black teens “nigger” and taunt them for having their “ass whipped.”

This article points out some major discrepancies that need to be addressed, such as what happened at the Fair Barn and the Gotta Go. I’m certainly willing to consider that I may have been wrong on some points; show me the evidence and I’ll gladly retract! But the basic fact of the Jena Six is so far undisputed – six teens face spending most of their adult lives in prison for a high school fight in which no one was seriously hurt.