From a Countercurrents article written by a civil rights attorney:
On Friday night, December 1, a black student who showed up at a white party was beaten by whites. On Saturday, December 2, a young white man pulled out a shotgun in a confrontation with young black men at the Gotta Go convenience store outside Jena before the men wrestled it away from him. The black men who took the shotgun away were later arrested, no charges were filed against the white man.
On Monday, December 4, at Jena High, a white student – who allegedly had been making racial taunts, including calling African American students “niggers” while supporting the students who hung the nooses and who beat up the black student at the off-campus party – was knocked down, punched and kicked by black students. The white victim was taken to the hospital treated and released. He attended a social function that evening.
Six black Jena students were arrested and charged with attempted second degree murder.
Were the arrested students — including Mychal Bell, who was found “guilty” last week but has not yet been sentenced — actually the ones who assaulted Justin Barker? Maybe (although even if so, this is an appalling overreaction to a school fight) — but we can’t really know, because Mychal Bell wasn’t given a fair trial.
Bell’s court-appointed attorney didn’t call any witnesses, object to the all-white jury, bring up inconsistancies in the testimony of prosecution witnesses, or bring up evidence in Bell’s favor. Nor, as far as I can tell, did he object to the prosecution bumping up the charges by arguing that wearing sneakers qualified the incident as “assault with a deadly weapon.”
From BlackAmericaWeb’s story:
“His court-appointed defense lawyer didn’t present a defense. He rested the case without challenging the prosecution’s story,” Alan Bean of the Texas-based Friends of Justice told BlackAmericaWeb.com. “He never said the young man was innocent. He only told the jury, ‘You should find him not guilty.'”
Bell, who is 16, could potentially be in prison until he turns 40.
This post at The Friends of Justice blog has the most detailed account of the case, and of Bell’s trial, I’ve yet read.
Here’s a petition you can sign, requesting that the Department of Justice begin a civil rights investigation of events in Jena, Alabama Louisiana.
Elle, Phd has a list of suggested actions you can take, plus links to a couple of videos.
While Seated has original reporting from Mychal Bell’s trial in Jena, including photographs.
Man, that’s terrible. Seems like these days the courts do more harm than good.
In the UK the latest news is that the courts have decided having sex with ten and twelve-year-olds isn’t really a crime…
Prosecutors have too much power and that power is basically unchecked. And court appointed defense attorneys are ridiculously underfunded, though no amount of public funding matters much where prosecutors hold all of the cards.
If you really want to effect change in this area, you need to deal with those two factors. The first thing that can be done locally in the area where this happened is to have the local prosecutor voted out of office and replaced with someone who is more ethical in charging (though this is difficult since most people only care about “get tough on crime” prosecutors). But even the best intentions there can be warped by the absolute power given to prosecutors, so legislative reform limiting prosecutorial power is the next step, along with full funding for defending poor defendants.
Unfortunately, I wouldn’t hold my breath for any of that to actually happen. But it is worth a shot.
A minor quibble: Jena is in Louisiana, not Alabama.
Wow, that’s an embarrassing mistake. Thank you for the correction.
Laura at Pursuing holiness as a great blog on this also.
Pingback: Update: The Jena Six Need Your Voice! at Trying to follow
An Open Letter To The Jena Six
By Joseph Young
Dear Mychal,
I keep thinking about you. I also think about the other young men who have fallen prey to racial hatred. Its existence, more than a century after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, makes me fearful for your life, your safety. The freedom that it promised was tenuous.
It was not entirely without strength. In the proclamation, issued three years into the Civil War, Lincoln declared, at the urging of Frederick Douglass, that the former slaves would be accepted into the Union Army and navy, making the liberated the liberator. By the war’s end, almost 200,000 black servicemen had fought for freedom and saved the Union.
Your generation, like mine, is being denied this freedom our ancestors risked life and limb, so that we may live as free men and women. You can call them heroes, but they were not thinking of themselves when they displayed courage and self-sacrifice on the battlefields of America.
Today, then, to guard against the impending doom of American civilization, is not only opposition to racism, but also the determination to secure the civil rights for which many Americans have paid a heavy toll. Of all the civil rights, the right to learn is the surest prevention from ignorance. If at any time, children are instructed with anti-black bias; and they are made to learn what is not true and what the dominate forces in their lives want them to think is true; there’re guilty of impeding the march toward American civilization.
Astonishing as it is that those students would hang three nooses from the tree at Jena High School as a racial taunt, including calling the black students ‘niggers’; you would think that America would never again want to see a black person hang from a tree, or behind bars. The nooses show that we, Americans, have not come that far from the cruelties and barbarity of slavery as we think. (Between 1882 and 1968, an estimated 5,000 people, mostly blacks, met their deaths at the hands of lynch mobs.) And this also is an unfortunate comment upon the belief that our schools are the great path to progress, the great equalizer. If our schools are the great path to progress, they must be the freest of our institutions, opposed bitterly to the attempt to indoctrinate our children with racial hatred.
Well, Mychal, as you and the others wait behind bars because of a racially biased and an over zealous prosecutor, it is for us on the outside to continue the unfinished work of our fathers, to set you free. All of you were willing to fight racial hatred, and you know people of goodwill are beside you. If the Confederacy couldn’t stop us, the opposition we now face will fail. When history is written your detractors will get little note, but you will be remembered for standing up for what’s best of the American creed. You are part of a legacy in which our slave forebears fought to birth a new nation. You, Mychal, are a child of America’s destiny.
It was Martin Luther King who said if a man doesn’t have something worth dying for he is not fit to live. Freedom is worth dying for. Justice is worth dying for. Equality is worth dying for. A child is worth dying for, because our job as parents is to protect children.
Mychal, when you feel complete frustration and your narrow jail cell is closing in on your spirit and mind; remember the message of the old slave preacher to his flock whose resistance to oppression might have been completely in vain:
“You are created in God’s image. You are not slaves, you are not ‘niggers’; you are God’s children.”
Godspeed Mychal,
Your brother in the struggle, Joseph
Bell is back in jail for different issue.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/5207752.html
i wish the article had more detail about why.
We may never learn all the reasons why because most of this will stay sealed in his juvenile record. Juvie trials are very much held in the equivalent of secret courts.