Howard Witt just filed this report on today’s House Judiciary Committee hearings into the Jena fiasco.  I didn’t catch the initial remarks by the half dozen witnesses, but the real drama didn’t unfold until the questions began to flow. 

As I hoped, US Attorney Donald Washington was deluged with tough questions from unless somebody does some serious prison timeenraged politicians like Sheila Jackson-Lee and Maxine Waters.  The heat generated by these blunt exchanges was not manufactured for the cameras; it was personal and it was emotional.  Mr. Washington has clearly shocked black politicians with his tacit endorsement of LaSalle Parish District Attorney, Reed Walters.

As Howard Witt’s report suggests, Washington did his best to restate his opinions without appearing to contradict himself.  The nooses hung at Jena High School in late August of 2006 constituted a hate crime, the US Attorney admitted; but the students responsible for the incident were too young to try under federal law.

This rhetoric is much stronger than anything we have heard from Mr. Washington up to this point.  Frankly, I agree with his assessment–so far as it goes.

The real issues didn’t emerge until late in the hearing.  Don Washington agreed that if Reed Walters had told protesting black students that he could make their lives disappear with a stroke of his pen he should be disciplined.  But, Washington argued, the DA had said nothing of the kind.

Asked to defend this surprising claim, Washington admitted that Walters had said “those words,” but that the prosecutor hadn’t meant by them what the congressman claimed he meant.  Since the wording of the allegations against Walters was taken straight out of my original Jena narrative, my ears perked up at that comment. 

The US Attorney hinted that Mr. Walters had not been “flanked by police officers” as I originally suggested.  In a literal sense, this may or may not be true.  But there can be no doubt that several officers, in full uniform, (probably the entire force) was present in the high school auditorium when Walters uttered his ominous threat.  As I have argued elsewhere, the “I can make your life disappear with a stroke of my pen” remark only makes sense when applied to the black students who, moments earlier, had created unrest on the campus by occupying the tree at the white end of the school yard.  White students may have been protesting the protesters–but then, so was Mr. Walters.

But I have worked that argument to death–the important point is that Mr. Washington is now on record as saying that, if Reed Walters meant what I say he meant, he should be disciplined.  That is a mighty step forward.

A second issue also passed unremarked by reporters: the sharp disagreement between Al Sharpton and Richard Cohen, CEO of the Southern Poverty Law Center, as to the source of the problem in Jena.  Sharpton thinks the noose hangers should have been tried in federal court as adults even if this carried the potential of ten years in prison without parole. 

Cohen disagrees.  He believes that all the tragic developments in Jena flowed from the tragic mishandling of the noose incident.

I am with Cohen on this one.  Rev. Sharpton, clearly angered by Cohen’s inconvenient perspective, proclaimed stridently that, unless somebody does some serious time behind bars, people will go around thinking that hate crimes are okay .  This is an extension of the flawed “lock-em-up; it’ll-teach-em-a-lesson” logic driving the current policy of mass incarceration.  

You can’t teach a kid to stop hating by sticking him in prison.  The child behind the hate crime must be taught why his behavior is hurtful and unacceptable.  Locking up the noose boys (even if such a thing were conceivable in a place like Jena) would simply have created martyrs for the South-gonna-rise-again cause.

A strong disciplinary response was clearly called for in September of 2006; but the criminal justice system provides remedies for very few problems–and this isn’t one of them.  Black parents weren’t angered because of the lax discipline; they were angered because school officials (and DA Walters) gave their tacit endorsement to the noose symbol by refusing to call hate by its proper name.  The lax disciplinary response was galling principally because it reinforced this message.

Republican lawmakers, for the most part, showed their support for Jena officials by boycotting the Jena hearings.  Reed Walters was asked to testify but politely declined the invitation.