Justice In Jena, Louisiana

Forgive me. I've been derelict in not posting on this story of justice in Jena, Louisiana, before now.

From the Advocate in Baton Rouge:

By MARY FOSTER
Associated Press writer

JENA — Shortly after meeting with a black teen jailed for beating a white schoolmate, the Rev. Al Sharpton on Sunday told the congregation of a small Baptist church that they must not rest until justice is handed down evenly in this little town.

“You can’t have black justice and white justice,” he said.

Sharpton said Mychal Bell, 17, convicted of aggravated second-degree battery and conspiracy to commit aggravated second-degree battery, is a “a fine young man. His situation is tragic and despicable.”
....

“You cannot have two levels of justice,” he said. “Some boys assault people and are charged with nothing. Some boys hang nooses and finish the school year. And some boys are charged with attempted murder.”

In comments directed at District Attorney Reed Walters, who is prosecuting the Jena Six, Sharpton said, “Did you think you were going to lock up our sons and stain their names, and we would do nothing? You can’t sit in the courthouse and have one rule for white kids and one for black kids.”

Let me add, on a personal note, that although Sharpton is not my favorite celebrity advocate, he is correct in this instance. It appears that more help is on the way to Bell.

From the Alexandria Town Talk:

A group of Monroe defense lawyers have taken on the appeal of Mychal Bell, one of six black high school students known as the Jena Six, convicted last month of beating a white fellow student.

Louis Scott, Bob Noel, Peggy Sullivan and Lee Perkins have agreed to work on Bell's post-conviction matters in a case and trial Scott described as fraught with errors.

"Almost always when you have an unfair result, somewhere down the line you had an unfair process," Scott said.

A six-person jury, repeatedly pointed out in media reports as all white, found Bell, 17, guilty of second-degree aggravated battery and conspiracy to commit second-degree aggravated battery on June 28 for the Dec. 4 assault on Justin Barker. Barker, who testified at trial he did not see who first struck him, sought treatment at an emergency room following the incident.

This article from Guardian from May of this year, gives more background on the story:

Jena, about 220 miles north of New Orleans, is a small town of 3,000 people, 85 per cent of whom are white. Tomorrow it will be the focus for a race trial which could put it on the map alongside the bad old names of the Mississippi Burning Sixties such as Selma or Montgomery, Alabama.
....

It began in Jena's high school last August when Kenneth Purvis asked the headteacher if black students could break with a long-held tradition and join the whites who sit under the tree in the school courtyard during breaks. The boy was told that he and his friends could sit where they liked.

The following morning white students had hung three nooses there. 'Bad taste, silly, but just a prank,' was the response of most of Jena's whites.

So nooses hanging in a tree are "bad taste, silly, and a prank". God help us!

'To us those nooses meant the KKK [Ku Klux Klan], they meant, "Niggers, we're going to kill you, we're going to hang you till you die,"' says Caseptla Bailey, a black community leader and mother of one of the accused. The three white perpetrators of what was seen as a race hate crime were given 'in-school' suspensions (sent to another school for a few days before returning).
....

On 30 November, someone tried to burn Jena High to the ground. The crime remains unsolved. That same weekend race fights between teenagers broke out downtown, and on 4 December racial tension boiled over once more in the school. A white student, Justin Barker, was attacked, allegedly by six black students.

The expected charges of assault and battery were not laid, and the six were charged with attempted second-degree murder and conspiracy to commit second-degree murder. They now face a lifetime in jail.

Barker spent the evening of the assault at the local Baptist church, where he was seen by friends to be 'his usual smiling self'.

As you saw in the more recent article above from the Advocate, the charges had been reduced to aggravated second-degree battery and conspiracy to commit aggravated second-degree battery. Mychal Bell was convicted and faces the possibility of many years in jail.

But now the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the American Civil Liberties Union - 'damned outsiders' - have become involved....

If the insiders had handled the situation better, the 'damned outsiders' might not have been needed.

According to the blogger Too Sense, Mychal's sentencing has been delayed until September and the Justice Department is now involved because of possible civil rights violations. This is the Bush-Gonzales Justice Department, which does not inspire great hope.

Mychal is in jail now and will remain there until September.

I had trouble putting the story together, because coverage has not been what it should have been. The two Louisiana newspapers that I read, the Baton Rouge Advocate and the New Orleans Times-Picayune have not, so far as I know, sent a reporter to cover the story, rather, they have used wire services sources.

Thanks to Dennis at Psychology, Dogs and Wine for providing a link to a site to show support for the Jena 6.

Ormonde Plater at Through the Dust, a fellow Louisianian, has done a better job of following the story than I have. See here and here.

Ormonde's second link shows before and after pictures of "the white students' tree".

This has been a difficult story to write because of having to pull many threads together, but also because I had to take breaks, because I was having flashbacks to incidents and attitudes that I hoped were relegated to the past.