“He’s dead because he’s Mexican. This is jury nullification….”
Meanwhile, check out the reaction of the woman interviewed about one minute into this piece:
Considering some of the details of the killing, it’s also inordinately clear this was a classic bias crime, with the incident instigated by racially charged taunts that made clear the victim was selected because of racial animus:
“Isn’t it a little late for you guys to be out?” the boys said, according to court documents. “Get your Mexican boyfriend out of here.”
… Burke recalled hearing one final, ominous threat as the teens ran. “They yelled, ‘You effin bitch, tell your effin Mexican friends get the eff out of Shenandoah or you’re gonna be laying effin next to him,’ ” she said.
That is, of course, the entire purpose of bias crimes: To hold the victim up as an example: “You’re next.” The purpose is to terrorize the target community, to drive them out, eliminate them.
Via: Racism Review. More on this case:
The Unapologetic Mexican
Stuff White People Do (source of the second video above)
Having grown up not too far away from there, I wish I could say I am surprised. Yes, if he hadn’t come to the United States, those boys would not have been forced to kick his head open.
I made the mistake of reading three comments on a CNN commentary about the trial. Now I need to go throw up. Sometimes I think the migration of the mainstream media toward the internet has been a net negative for humanity. There are just too many people who use it as an opportunity to express their hatred for others, and not in a “sunlight is the best disinfectant” way, as nothing productive ever seems to come of MSM articles’ comment threads.
PG,
I had a long response about comments on MSM Web sites, but I decided it was a derail, so I’m putting it on an open thread.
I hadn’t heard of the case before this post; that’s horrible.
I have problems with video online; if anyone else is interested in text stuff, here is:
Associated Press report on the verdict
CNN story page on the verdict (WARNING; graphic photo)
Huffington Post article (contains links to other article at the bottom)
WTF? How does this happen? Not the original crime, but the jury. Twelve adult citizens with not one shred of humanity between them.
I wish I knew more about the legal process here. Particularly if anything can happen if a former member of the aforementioned jury stands up and calls foul.
Gladys Limón commentary, hosted at CNN.
What exactly is wrong with jury nullification? Now, I agree that if the jurors were using jury nullification in this case, they were wrong, but jury nullification is not inherently evil.
I’m a libertarian, so I disagree with the authors and many of the commenters of this blog on many issues, but one issue I hope we agree on is the war on drugs. If you were on a jury in a trial where someone had the possibility of going to prison for several years merely for possessing, using, or selling a substance that the government doesn’t like, would you not attempt to utilize jury nullification?
They’re probably very nice and humane to other white people.
I’ll try…
From what I have picked up across various articles, the defense focused on a few things:
1) The “adult” status of the victim, which the defense used to claim, in essence, that the victim was at fault. In other words, they said that he should have been “adult enough” to walk away.
2) The prosecution witnesses, who were presumably given immunity in exchange for testimony. Immunity alone usually makes juries distrust the witness. In this case, the defense claimed that the evidence showed that the (immune) witness was the one who landed the fatal kick.
Both of those defenses were apparently well done; the prosecution may have dropped the ball here.
I have to say that this verdict makes me really angry. Simple assault? that’s what you get convicted of when you break someone’s nose, not when you KILL someone, for fuck’s sake.
I have to say that this verdict makes me really angry. Simple assault?
Yeah. I can kind of, sort of see not coming back on the murder charge (the report said “third-degree murder,” which I’m assuming is equivalent to manslaughter), though I feel like I’ve seen people get convicted of second degree and certainly manslaughter for what these guys did. But not even agg assualt?
There’s really no way to read this verdict as saying anything other than that the victim didn’t count.
I also was wondering about the legal details – I don’t want to diminish the awfulness of the jury’s decision, but I wonder if part of the blame goes to the prosecution for presenting the case ineffectively. The underage attackers were being charged as adults; could that have had something to do with the jury’s reluctance to convict? The issues that Sailorman brought up are also important factors. I’m not sure who the prosecutor was- maybe part of the problem here is that poor people and immigrants who are often the targets of these crimes have inadequate access to good lawyers.
I sympathize with the sense that justice was not done here, but I’m not sure what the appropriate response is.
The crime and trial took place in Schuykill County, PA, which is about 97% white and 1% Hispanic. Is it improper is such a location to have an “all White” (or “all non-Hispanic”) jury?
The victim’s girlfriend testified that the victim started the fight. (This was after the white kids shouted racial epithets, but the evidence was pretty clear that the victim started the violence.)
There was conflicting evidence that the actual killer was the guy who had taken the plea deal, and the others were not as actively involved.
Taken together, without having sat through the trial, I think PERSONALLY that these boys are guilty as sin of murder. How sure am I, though? Maybe 75% sure. So, given a “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard, my 75% certainty means that I should vote to acquit.
There is a law school hypothetical, where it is 100% that one of two identical twins committed a cold-blooded, pre-meditated murder, but the police cannot determine which twin it was. Legally correct answer? Neither is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Here, there are a bunch of defendants claiming that they only hit the guy a few times, and the fatal blow came from someone else. Even though I think they are guilty, I just don’t see how you convict everyone based on that evidence.
Rich B, perhaps if you got your mind out of the courtroom for some fresh air, you’d find this case somewhat more alarming? Aside from the possibility of racist juridical malfeasance, there’s the lack of attention these verdicts are getting in the corporate media, and in the collective white American psyche.
As I wrote in a post that’s linked in the post above:
flip the script and imagine how much attention an opposite situation would get:
A white couple’s car breaks down as they’re driving along an urban interstate. They stop near an exit, then walk into a largely Latino neighborhood. A similar fight ensues, and the man’s partner says that the teenagers who beat him to death shouted anti-white slurs as they did so.
Somehow, an all-Latino jury is assembled, and despite charges of ethnic intimidation, assault with a deadly weapon, and murder, it passes down similarly lenient convictions of “simple assault” to the Latino defendants. No one gets convicted for the white man’s murder.
Would the corporate media, and much of white America, be all over this story, demanding a retrial and stoking the flames of anti-immigration, anti-Latino sentiment?
Of course they would.
And since the white-framed corporate media, and white people who have heard about the Ramirez case, are not all up in arms about it, that can only lead to this conclusion–white Americans generally value non-white lives less than they do white ones.
Rosa @ 5,
Yes, the jury verdict is what I find really disturbing. Where there have been high-profile homicides of minorities in other parts of the country (e.g. Matthew Shepherd, James King), I’ve objected to the smearing of a whole town as infused with racist simply because a few bad people did a very bad thing. But in those cases, the community recognized that it was a very bad thing and juries pronounced verdicts accordingly. Part of the point of having a jury system is so the community can give its judgment. In this case, the Shenandoah community apparently doesn’t think it’s a big deal.
I could see the jury’s unwillingness to say there had been a felony beyond a reasonable doubt if there were uncertainty about the identity of the assailants, but there isn’t. We know who was there; the defendants, after initially trying to cover up, admitted that they were there and that they used racial epithets, that they did not feel threatened by the defendant and felt they could have walked away unharmed had they chosen to do so. It was a fight of four varsity football players against a single average-sized man; they weren’t acting in self-defense.
Andrew @ 7,
I think jury nullification should be used very rarely if the law is to mean anything at all. If the law is bad (and I think criminal penalties for drug possessino are bad), the law should be changed, not ignored on a case-by-case basis depending on how sympathetic you find the defendants. These jurors seem to have weighed the life of an illegal immigrant who allegedly had been cheating on his fiancee with her 15-year-old half-sister against the futures of four white, middle class, college-bound local boys, and the sympathetic defendants beat out the unsympathetic dead man.
Stuff like this makes me wish there was a different classification other than ‘white’ that I could be…cause this is not what I want to belong to and answer for from other people who look at whites and think racist. Sort of like that Chris Rock sketch…
My own disgust aside, I agree that if there had been a better prosecution, there might have been a chance despite the obvious racism that exists in the community.
I’m picking up something else: There seems to be no uncertainty of who was in the area. But one of the main defense tactics was to elicit uncertainty about who precisely were the assailants, and whether one or more of the assailants was not accused at all.
It seems to come down to this: You have five people*, one or more of whom obviously killed the victim, and all of whom were obviously complicit to some degree. But you can’t figure out exactly who did which action; IOW you can’t easily prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, exactly who did what. Who can you convict, and of what crime(s)?
The answer is not so clear to me. I’m not sure, for example, of whether you can convict people for being accomplices or aiding and abetting, if you can’t figure out who the leader was–do you need a leader to have an accomplice? I know there are theories of group liability in the civil context but I am not so sure that they exist in the criminal context, or how they work if so.
So while I am in complete agreement that something really bad happened here, and I think it’s obvious that someone killed Ramirez, and I am in complete confusion about how the verdict ended up as it did… I can’t conclude “juror nullification” until I understand more of the criminal law angle. Any criminal lawyers here?
*Four defendants plus the government’s witness; I think there was only one witness given immunity.
Would the corporate media, and much of white America, be all over this story, demanding a retrial and stoking the flames of anti-immigration, anti-Latino sentiment?
Yes, and this blog would (rightfully) be all over pointing out how racist the media was being.
Rich B, perhaps if you got your mind out of the courtroom for some fresh air, you’d find this case somewhat more alarming?
I’m not sure how to get from here to there. If from a strictly legal point of view, we cannot determine how much of the verdict was racism and how much was legitimate reasonable doubt, I’m not seeing the point of attacking the media for failure to over-react the same way that they would over-react if the races were reversed.
If you leave out the merits of the court case, it’s sort of a weird reverse criticism your left with. The media did not act inappropriately, like it would have in the race’s had been different. And therefore, by not acting inappropriately, they acted inappropriately.
Why is the media “over-reacting” when it heavily covers homicide cases that end with little or no punishment for the perpetrators? Bob Herbert makes this point well today: he’s not saying the media shouldn’t care about the deaths of pretty young white women, he just wants a similar level of attention for the deaths of poor kids of color.
Andrew, I don’t have a problem with jury nullification in and of itself. I do have a serious problem with the idea of jury nullification in this case, because what it would mean is that 12 adult citizens believed that murdering a Mexican boy should not be considered a serious crime. To me, that is positively chilling, in a way that a jury deciding against a guilty verdict because of reasonable doubt is simply not.
I don’t think you even need to “reverse” the races to see the racism in play. I have a very hard time imagining a similar verdict if the victim was white – even keeping the race of the defendants the same. And actually, I have a very hard time imagining the attack even taking place if the victim were white. It hasn’t come up on this thread, but a lot has been made elsewhere of the age difference between the victim and the girl he was with – she was 15, he was in his 20s – and she may have been his girlfriend’s sister and may have been his girlfriend and may have been both. It is very hard to imagine a similar “what are doing out so late?” policing of this couple’s behavior if they were both white.
There may well have been some reasonable doubt about who struck the fatal blow, but if you consider that people have been sent up on felony murder charges just for driving a get-away car, this verdict is appalling.
Re: group liability
Here in VA we have crimes like “assault by mob” and “malicious wounding (basically our version of felonious assault) by mob” in which once it is proved that the accused was part of the “mob,” they are responsible for the actions of the mob, whether or not their conduct rises to the level of accomplice liability (which generally requires more evidence of an intent to aid the perpetrator, and/or an overt act of assistance – though I’d think that landing a single punch or kick would put you in the accomplice category).
Of course, being a defense attorney I can’t say I encourage other states to adopt assault by mob statutes. I kind of think it’s wrong to punish people who are just there, even if they are part of the group conducting the attack, at the same level as those who actually beat the *** out of someone. But I could also see it functioning in this context where you know someone did it, but not who. Especially since the people who didn’t actually do the beat-down have a stronger incentive to plead and testify when facing a harsher penalty. (Though the people who did the beat down also have a stronger incentive to plead and say they were the ones who were just there).
Emily,
Is the “assault by mob” coming from the civil rights era legislation? I can certainly see how in a lynching situation, you’d have trouble getting any defendant to reliably finger whodunnit, but that you at least could identify who had been part of the mob.
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