http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-jena_lawsuit_weboct23,1,6041280.story

Tribune, other media firms file motion to to end Jena trial secrecy

By Howard Witt | Tribune senior correspondent

8:39 PM CDT, October 22, 2007

HOUSTON – A coalition of major American media companies filed a 1st Amendment petition Monday seeking to open to public scrutiny the criminal trial of Mychal Bell, one of the teenage defendants in the controversial Jena 6 case in Louisiana.

The legal motion, filed in LaSalle Parish District Court, challenges the decisions by presiding Judge J.P. Mauffray to close the proceedings in Bell’s juvenile case and order all the parties involved not to speak about it. Mauffray’s orders run counter to Louisiana juvenile laws, precedents set by the Louisiana Supreme Court and provisions of both the Louisiana and U.S. Constitutions, the petition asserts.

The Chicago Tribune is the lead plaintiff in the petition, which has been joined by the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times Co., the Associated Press, the Hearst Corp., the Belo Corp., the Gannett Corp., CNN and ABC News.

Bell, 17, is one of six black teenagers charged in an attack last Dec. 4 at Jena High School in which a white student was beaten and knocked briefly unconscious. That incident capped months of violent racial tensions in the small, mostly white central Louisiana town that was set off after three white youths hung nooses from a tree at the high school a day after a black student had asked school administrators whether blacks were permitted to sit beneath its shade.

LaSalle Parish District Atty. Reed Walters initially charged the six black youths with attempted murder for the attack, even though the white victim was treated and released at a local hospital. After the case gained national attention following a May 20 Chicago Tribune story, Walters reduced the charges to aggravated second-degree battery and conspiracy to commit aggravated second-degree battery, arguing that the tennis shoes the defendants allegedly wore constituted a deadly weapon.

National civil rights organizations, including the NAACP, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Southern Poverty Law Center, as well as civil rights leaders including Rev. Jesse Jackson, Rev. Al Sharpton and Martin Luther King III, have all contended that the charges against the black youths are unusually harsh and racially discriminatory in light of Walters’ decision not to file equivalent charges against whites in the town who attacked blacks. The Congressional Black Caucus has denounced the prosecution and the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing into the matter.

On Sept. 20, more than 20,000 African Americans from across the country marched through Jena in a peaceful protest in support of the Jena 6 defendants.

Walters has denied that race played any role in his prosecutorial decisions. But his handling of Bell’s case, as well as Mauffray’s rulings, have been fraught with complications and controversies.

Bell, the first defendant to come to trial, was originally tried in June as an adult and convicted by an all-white jury after his court-appointed public defender called no witnesses on his behalf. But a Louisiana appellate court vacated that conviction in September, finding that Walters and Mauffray had improperly tried Bell as an adult rather than a juvenile.

After Walters decided to refile the battery and conspiracy charges against Bell in juvenile court, Mauffray agreed to release Bell on $45,000 bond after the youth had been held for nearly 10 months on the adult charges. But two weeks later, Mauffray abruptly reversed that decision and ordered Bell jailed for 18 months on four prior juvenile convictions, for simple battery and criminal destruction of property.

Mauffray’s reasons for sending Bell back to jail are unknown because the judge ordered all of Bell’s juvenile proceedings to be conducted in private. The petition brought Monday by the media consortium asserts, however, that Bell’s case must be open to the public according to state and federal laws.

The motion cites, among other arguments, a 2004 Louisiana Supreme Court ruling that all juvenile proceedings involving certain categories of violent crime—including aggravated second-degree battery—must be conducted in open court.

The petition also contends that Mauffray improperly imposed a gag order on lawyers in the case.

“The underlying facts of this case have been published, broadcast, editorialized about, blogged and talked about throughout the country and across the globe,” the petition states. “There is simply no reason to refuse to allow the trial participants to comment as well.”

hwitt@tribune.com

Much has been said about the mainstream media’s slow reaction to the case of the Jena 6.  Actually, I was very pleased with the media’s response time: a slow response is better than no response (which is what I usually get when I try to interest journalists in a criminal justice horror story).  The mainstream folks have atoned for their supposed sins by generating an avalanche of Jena 6 and noose stories.  The real anomaly is the silence of the progressive media, in general, and the liberal blogosphere, in particular.

D. Yobachi Boswell’s BlackPerspective.net features a probing assessment of the virtual whiteout on the Jena story within the progressive white blogoshpere.  It has been suggested by some white lefty types that the a-list blogs restrict their attention to beltway politics and legal issues.  Well, Mr. Boswell says, doesn’t the recent Jena hearing in DC qualify on both counts?  Yet, once again, white liberal bloggers are MIA.  

A number of posts from black bloggers raised similar questions after the massive march on September 20th.

Conservative bloggers love the Jena story because it provides a coveted opportunity to trash Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson.  This is especially true after the Jena Geek Squad started flooding the web with self-serving misinformation–the kind of nonsense that inevitably follows any published story on Jena with a comment section (including every post I write). 

But what about the white progressives?  Don’t they care about racial inequality, social justice, hate crimes and all that good liberal stuff?

Not really.  Why should they?  These people have never seen a family member or a close friend mangled beyond recognition by the criminal justice system.  White drug dealers (and every American college campus is crawling with them) have little to fear from the criminal justice system.  The Duke Lacrosse team brushed up against a vindictive prosecutor, but they had the legal firepower to turn the tables.  White people desperately want to believe that America is a level-playing-field meritocracy: a comforting notion for those on top.

White liberals (or progressives, if you prefer) love the moral clarity of the civil rights movement, a time when the issues were simple and straightforward.  Or were they?  If the typical white progressive was suddenly transported back to 1962, he would join the sensible center in condemning Martin Luther King as a race baiter, a shit-stirrer, a polarizing radical. 

Some would suggest that white liberals are silent on the Jena 6 issue because they don’t want to be associated with Mychal Bell’s oft-lamented criminal history.  But they were ignoring this story long before Mychal’s juvenile record became accessible to the public. 

Here’s the simple truth, white liberals don’t like the kind of people who are routinely chewed up and spit out by the American criminal justice system.  They love poor people in the abstract, but they generally don’t know any and, more to the point, they arrange their lives so as to insure that they never do.  Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, but it gets in the way of moral clarity.

Mr. Boswell loves the people who are routinely chewed up and spit out by the American criminal justice sytsem because some of them are his friends and family members.  How do I know that?  Call it an educated guess.  Boswell is African American, and intimate association with the system is, with very few exceptions, an inescapable aspect of the black experience in our country.

The upside is that even the silence of progressive white bloggers on the Jena affair is contributing to the long-postponed conversation this story has unleashed.  Our silence defines who we are every bit as much as our rhetoric.  A lot of what we are learning about ourselves ain’t pretty, but we need to know.

___________________________

Coverage of the Jena 6 Hearings by White Progressive Bloggosphere

Back on the day of the Jena 6 March, Pam at Pam’s House Blend lamented the White Bloggosphere being MIA on Jena 6.

Well, we were enlightened that one reason for this was that the top tier so-called “progressive” bloggers that Pam specifically mentioned are “in the beltway” bloggers who blog on beltway issues.

Oh that’s it? Well, shame on me for my darn tong lashing.

Well certainly congress is in the beltway, so I know these blogs covered the October 16th hearing on the Jena 6 and hate crimes that took place with the House Judiciary Committee this week; because what’s more beltway than congress?

Well let’s run down that same list and see what good coverage we find this time:

Daily Kos, again nothing on the front page from the contributing writers, including Kos himself, though he had time to writer approximately 8 different post on the 16th alone.

Talkingpointsmemo.com, umm well, no commentary from them either; but at least their news headlines feed picked up an article by the associated press that ended up on their page by accident. They might want to look into that feed so that they won’t have that mistake again. I don’t think they intended to have that information on their.

As a matter of fact, a search of the site’s search engine only brings up one article ever on Talkingpoinsmemo, from September 22, lambasting Presidential Candidate Fred Thompson for not knowing anything about the Jena 6. The hysterically ironic part about a Talkingpointsmemo writer taking Thompson to task about that on the Talkingpointsmemo site, is that; even if Thompson read Talkingpointsmemo.com every single day, he still would not know a thing about the Jena 6.

atrios.blogspot.com/ – not a word!

How bout TalkLeft, which Pam previously described as having had “positioned itself as the leading progressive blog about criminal justice issues “

*Ding* *Ding* *Ding* *Ding* *Ding* TalkLeft actually dropped it’s readers a little note on the hearings and even minimally recognized what the real issue is.

So far we have all of a strapping 5 sentences from leading liberal white blog sites.

So let’s go on to firedoglake.com/to see if he can up the batting average…No! But I will give them credit, that their archive’s do at least contain 6 or 7 post on Jena since coming late to the party on the September 20th. Maybe I just needed to give them a couple more days to catch up again before doing this survey of “progressive” bloggers.

Well ya know the HuffingtonPostgot our back right – wrong. Not even the token black guy on the site could muster up one for the home team like last time. And this is with over 40 articles posted on Tuesday alone. I guess Kassey Kasem would tell us that this is not a Top 40 issue to white liberal America (get it? Kassey Kasem, top 40?).

Though, white writer Heather Wood has a decent piece on 10 Mistakes White People Make When Talking About Race After reading the comments on the White Bloggosphere being MIA on Jena 6, I’m thinking a lot of y’all could really stand to read this.

Pam noted in the MIA post that ThinProgresscould only muster two sentences last time. Well not to be outdone by their blanketing September 20th coverage, they come back with two more sentences buried in their “ThinkFast” daily roundup type post.

So even after the historic march, and even when the issue is in congress, so-called “progressive” netroots “reporters” don’t find the issue very news worthy. Maybe they’re taking the lead from progressive television favorite Keith Olberman who had no real time for the story either. I guess with doing two segments on Ellen DeGeneres’ dog on back-to-back days, and devoting his number 1 story the day of the hearing to Britney gossip, news that matters to a major part of his viewing constituency just didn’t matter to him.

But then again, when white women cry and when precious blond girls are having a tough time being rich, who in the news business has time for things like, oh I don’t know, say…the news?

Bottom line is white “Progressives” continue to ignore something that’s of great importance to a major part of their constituency. What’s more striking though than them not responding to what we care about is that fact that they don’t care about it in and of themselves.

Maybe we need to look more deeply at this liberal exploitation; where we’re used for our votes because they couldn’t win the house, the senate, or the presidency without us, but when we want something, it’s like, get loss.

I guess racial injustice; equal protection under the law; and fairness and equality in prosecution, enforcement of the law, and sentencing; aren’t things a “progressive” movement should be concerned about.

Maybe if we had more sympathetic defendants then there’d be a little interest from the white progressive world.

Maybe if it was this Louisianan under the gun, then they’d take notice:

There is nothing remarkable about the sentiments expressed in Frank Conaway’s op-ed in the Baltimore Sun.  It’s a restatement of the standard civil rights generation assertion that the hip hop generation has strayed from the ancient virtues of pre-civil rights black America. 

Conaway isn’t angry.  His tone is gentle.  And, unlike white conservatives who spin Cosbyesque arguments to their own purposes, the Baltimore court clerk isn’t appalled by black America’s show of support for the Jena 6.  In fact, he is inspired by the solidarity and wants to see more of it.

White conservatives (and black opportunists like Jason Whitlock who distort the Jena story because it ensures appreciative reviews from white conservatives) are rending their garments in horror over the enthusiastic support African Americans have demonstrated for the six black football players accused of assaulting Justin Barker.

“They are talking up these boys like they was Rosa Parks,” the narrative goes, “and they’re just a bunch of thugs!”

Invariably, “thugs” is the term of choice.  It reduces normal, small town boys to a cold, malevolent inner city caricature.  It associates the Jena 6 with the more unsavory elements of the old “gangsta” rap scene (thereby hooking the outrage of civil rights blacks and moderate-to-conservative whites).  

In America, a “thug” is a throwaway person, a member of the dangerous classes, a person in relation to whom concepts like the presumption of innocence, due process and reasonable doubt can have no meaning.  When a sure-fire thug stands before the bar of justice there can be only two questions–what is the maximum charge, and what is the maximum sentence.   A thug is guilty by virtue of who he is.

When Carwin Jones and Bryant Purvis were introduced to the audience at the BET hip hop awards ceremony in Atlanta, the announcer assured the audience that no one associated with the production condoned violence.  Nonetheless, when Carwin and Bryant strolled onto the stage, they received an ecstatic ovation.

Why?  Were the folks in Atlanta under the false impression that Carwin and Bryant were fighting sister Rosa’s good fight? 

Not at all.  The audience applauded because they identify.  As Sammie Barrow, the brother and uncle of four of the young men railroaded in Tulia, Texas on the word of a white cop, once told me, “These kids don’t rate as no thugs”. 

Every member of the audience in Atlanta has a close relative or a personal friend who has run afoul of the criminal justice system.  There wasn’t enough money to hire a lawyer so the kid was assigned an overworked and jaded public defender or court appointed attorney who drifted through the motions as if in a daze.  Maybe the young defendant took a plea bargain because a conviction would have put him away for decades; maybe he went to trial and got hammered by a white judge and jury.  Maybe he was guilty; maybe not.  It didn’t matter.  Conviction followed on the heels of arrest with soul-destroying inevitability.

The facts in these cases are often muddy.  Neither the state nor the defense takes the time to ask too many questions before entering the courtroom.  Dockets are clogged and time is at a premium.  So the prosecutor tells the jury the defendant is a dangerous thug and the defense attorney mumbles a few words about insufficient evidence.  The jury doesn’t care about legal technicalities–if the defendant is a thug, he belongs in prison.  It isn’t a matter of what he has or hasn’t done; it’s about who he is.

When I showed up in Jena in January of this year, the Jena 6 were being portrayed as pathological predators from the darkest sanctums of Ninth Ward New Orleans.   But when I visited with members of the black community I got an entirely different story.  “I’ve grown up across the street from these kids,” the sole black member of the school board told me.  “I’ve watched them grow up.  They’re just ordinary boys–good boys.”

In other words, “These kids don’t rate as no thugs.”

Then how do normal school boys get sucked into a vortex of violence?  What motivated the white kids who jumped Robert Bailey at the Fair Barn on Friday night?  Whence the rage?  Why did Justin Barker get jumped at the high school?  Whence the rage? 

One thing was clear to me as I sifted through the facts before me; Robert Bailey and Justin Barker had run afoul of the same smoldering animus.  None of these kids were thugs–black or white–just kids tangled up in forces they dimly understood and over which they had little control.

It is commonly supposed that the rage in Jena originated with nooses hanging from an all-white tree.  Not so.  The black kids took offense to the hateful symbol, but they didn’t know enough about the racial history of America to appreciate the full significance of a noose dangling from a tree. 

Their parents had longer memories.  They remembered Jena’s segregated school yard from their own school years back in the 70s and 80s.  Everyone had learned to live with it.  Yet they were proud of Kenneth Purvis for challenging the status quo–something they never dreamed of doing.  And they were clear on one point–the nooses had been hung in direct response to Kenneth’s challenging question about where he could and couldn’t sit.

These parents were willing to wait for school officials to respond to the issue.  Everything hung in the balance, and parents on both sides of the color line knew it.  A strong disciplinary response to the nooses (the kind recommended by the principal) would have signalled that the de facto segregation at the high school was a thing of the past.  A weak response would suggest that nothing had changed.

And that’s why my narrative focused on the gross misconduct of Superintendent Roy Breithaupt (who called the noose incident a childish prank), an arrogant and unresponsive school board (who wouldn’t even allow black parents to voice their concerns), and a bizarre prosecutor named Reed Walters (who threatened to punish any student bold enough to protest the status quo). 

The rage in Jena was kindled by these brazen acts.  Some white students (those emotionally invested in the maintenance of the color line at the high school) responded with glee to these not-so-subtle hints of official validation.  But the white boys found themselves locked into an adversarial relationship with the black students who inspired Mr. Walters’ “stroke of my pen” threat. 

Throughout the football season, the hostility was driven underground, erupting off campus in a series of inconsequential dust-ups that disintegrated when somebody called the police.  Then fire was seen billowing from the windows at the schoolhouse and all bets were off.

The next day, Robert Bailey, a black football player at the center of the September tree protest, requested admittance to a private dance on the white side of town.  The furies were released. 

The folks at the BET awards ceremony understand this story.  They have seen it happen before.  The Jena 6 aren’t Rosa Parks.  Rosa Parks was the face of the Old Jim Crow.  The Jena 6 symbolize the New Jim Crow that has been gradually taking control of the American criminal justice system for over a quarter century now. 

The New Jim Crow is why America imprisons five to eight times as many citizens per 100,000 as other Western democracies.  White America, tragically, is as oblivious to these sinister developments as I once was.

Frank Conaway understands the Jena 6, but he still wants to talk to the kids.  And, precisely because he “gets” Jena, the Baltimore court clerk deserves a receptive audience. 

African-Americans must rise to the example of our forefathers

By Frank M. Conaway

October 21, 2007

I once knew a proud man. He was called “black” or “Negro” – or worse. This man worked long hours to provide for his wife and five children. Rain or shine, he rose early and went to his job at the docks. It was a tough job, a thankless job. He didn’t mind because he knew he had to provide for his family.

He didn’t graduate from elementary school. However, he made his children stay in school because he knew an education would open doors for them that had been closed to him. He made sure he instilled in his kids a sense of values and good moral judgment. And, yes, he voted in every election.

When hard times came, he did not complain. This man was not angry, because he knew anger destroys the soul. Before civil rights became a reality, he dreamed of a better day. He dreamed that his children would become productive citizens.

Our forefathers, like the man I speak of, suffered, fought and died to make our lives better. As they look down on us, they must be so disappointed in what little we have done with our lives. They struggled to make black people equal, to get us the right to vote. What have we done with those hard-won rights? Many of us do not exercise our right to vote, much less become politically active. It is easier to sit back and complain about how unfair life is to African-Americans.

True, sometimes we are stirred to action. It was heartening to see how the African-American community bonded during the recent “Jena 6” ordeal. Black people from all walks of life went to Louisiana, or met at colleges and churches across the United States, to show their solidarity for the six African-American students who were unfairly charged in a racially motivated incident.

But such cases are rare. I have not seen this type of coming together of African-Americans for a long, long time – not since the civil rights movement of the 1960s. We, as a people, need to keep this momentum going. It is fine to support the Jena 6, but will we change how we run our own lives?

To quote Gandhi, “The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world’s problems.” We need to cure ourselves of our apathy. We need to rid ourselves of the collective chip on our shoulders and stop asking what’s going to be done for us. If our noise-making isn’t followed by action, it serves no purpose other than to grab headlines.

Many immigrants, legal and illegal, have arrived in the United States with little money in their pockets, not speaking English and with no transferable education. Yet they are industrious and find ways to make a living. Often, they work long hours in what others would call disagreeable jobs. However, within a generation, many become productive citizens who give back to the community. Many immigrants struggle to send their children to college. In turn, many of the second generation become professionals. Once immigrant families are established as citizens, they become politically active so their voices can be heard.

Many African-American dreamers have also turned their dreams into reality: people such as Booker T. Washington, Rosa Parks, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. These men and women and countless others paved the road for us with their blood, struggles and suffering. We need to get back on this road and travel together to keep their dreams alive.

The African-American community needs to wake from its collective sleep and begin to live its dreams. We began to wake up with the Jena 6. Now, we need to take a cue from the examples set by immigrants. If this is too uncomfortable, we should look back to our forefathers, who fought for our equality.

It will take hard work. Blacks are a strong force, one to be reckoned with – if we would only get our acts firmly together and stop lamenting what could or should be. African-Americans need to finally begin to be accountable for their lives and take action to improve their lot in life – like that man with the five children and almost no education, who yet managed to achieve a better life for his family.

He was my father.

The fact is that too often, we are our own oppressors. A strong dose of self-respect is greatly needed to cure the many social ills that plague the black community. We need to stop making excuses for our misfortunes and get on with it. These are tough words, I know. But sometimes the truth hurts.

Frank M. Conaway is clerk of the Circuit Court for Baltimore City.

A while back, I suggested that you won’t find nooses hanging from trees in New York City because, “that’s a Southern thing”.

We can’t always get it right.

The New York Times coverage of the Jena incident has been raising eyebrows coast to coast.  “What’s with the Times?” people ask me. 

Now that the noose craze has become too prominent and disturbing to ignore, the Times has published a well-written story by Paul Vitello focusing on noose hangings in the New York region.  There have been several, and they just keep coming. 

Mr. Vitello’s grasp of the situation in Jena is as weak as a dead fish hand shake.  The Jena 6, Vitello tells us, are “accused of beating a white youth who they thought was involved in hanging nooses from a tree at Jena High School.”

Did they now?  Vitello, like everyone else associated with The Grey Lady, has never taken the time to follow the flow of events in Jena.  They asked the guy to write a story on nooses and he obliged.  Ten minutes of research on Jena and Vitello comes up with a motivation no one remotely associated with the story has ever suggested.

There are three Jena stories.  In Jena’s white community, it’s all about six black thugs beating an innocent white boy within an inch of his life.  In the mainstream media we often get a story that jumps from nasty white kids hanging nooses to nasty black kids attacking a white boy (given this framing, Vitello’s thesis is understandable).

The real Jena story chronicles a slow, spiraling descent into chaos sparked by the refusal of public officials to validate legitimate protest from Jena’s black community.  If these cases ever make it back into the courtroom, this is the story America will hear.

All of that said, Paul Vitello treats the recent rash of noose incidents in Gotham with insight and sensitivity.  We learn, for instance, that ” The black population [of Long Island] is about 12 percent of the total, but is highly concentrated in a half-dozen communities that are 95 percent minority. In 2004, in Suffolk County, it was still possible for an interracial couple to wake up in the night to find a cross burning on their lawn — it happened in a hamlet called Lake Grove.”

Who knew?  A story about nooses, faithfully pursued, can turn up all sorts of useful information.

Everyone wants to talk about the series of copycat noose hangings across the country.  Notice, the noose hangers are almost never apprehended.  The three boys responsible for hanging the nooses in Jena stepped forward and acknowledged their culpability.  Why?  One can only speculate.  But I suspect it was because they were assured that people in high places would pass the incident off as an innocent prank.

That’s what angered Jena’s black community.  Black people and white people looked at the same nooses hanging from the same tree and reacted in two distinct ways.  Black parents were horrified; white parents shrugged and moved on.

Like I say, everyone wants to talk about nooses.  Darryl Fears of the Washington Post (the first flagship newspaper in America to cover Jena) returns with a he-said-she-said story about how folks across the country are responding to the noose issue. 

Even the sophisticates have an opinion.  Robin Givhan uses the disturbing silhouette art of Kara Walker (currently on display at New York’s Whitney museum) as a backdrop for her comments.  According to Givhan, Walker’s disturbing, often obscene evocations of America’s slave days, suggest that “Everyone — black and white — has suffered because of slavery’s legacy. Everyone has baggage — huge steamer trunks filled with issues of self-esteem, entitlement and disenfranchisement. But while making allowances for that, she also argues that the fallout from slavery is a tangled web of grotesquerie, violence and absurdity. And everyone — white and black — has some culpability.”

An impressive introduction, you must admit.  Unfortunately, Givhan’s essay will be seen by most readers as yet another endorsement of Bill Cosby’s “blame the poor” rant. 

I think there is a deeper message.  A lot of grotesque behavior and over-the-top rhetoric has been generated by the Jena story.  My wife, Nancy, sees the media’s fixation with Jena as an illustration of the opening words of John’s Gospel: “the light shineth in the darkness.”  Unfortunately, the divine illumination has become stage lighting for an odd assortment of self aggrandizing minstrels, jugglers and high wire artists.  If that’s Givhan’s point–fair enough.

Douglas Lyons of the Florida Sun-Sentinel checks in today with a piece about nooses and all white juries.  “In an era of Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey and Tiger Woods,” Lyons writes, “two throwbacks from a dark period of America’s past continue to show surprising resilience. Makes you wonder how far we’ve come.”

It is frequently pointed out that, given the demographics of LaSalle Parish, an all-white jury was virtually inevitable. But the concept of a “jury of ones peers” suggests that at least one-quarter of the composition of any jury should be of the same race as the defendant whenever possible.  White people don’t feel this problem because it isn’t something we need to worry about.

The light shines in the darkness, in Jena and across America, and a great profusion of strange, exotic, and deeply disturbing facts, fancies and fanatics are being revealed.  In the midst of all the hype, the prevarication, the jeremiads, the cavalier dismissals and the honest inquiry we are growing and maturing as a people.   The conversation ain’t always pretty–but is necessary and long overdue. 

You know things are changing when Will Harrell, one of the most prominent criticis of the Texas criminal justice system, is named ombudsman for the Texas Youth Commission.  Back in 2000, Will was the first civil rights advocate in Texas to rally around the Friends of Justice in out Tulia fight, and he has been a close friend of our organization ever since.   This article in the Houston Chronicle is based on Mr. Harrell’s testimony before the Texas House Corrections Committee during which he recommended the closing of the TYC facility at Vernon.

My guess is that the juvenile prison where Mychal Bell is currently being sequestered is at least as bad as the facility in Vernon, Texas. 

Many of you have heard that the prison outside Jena has been shut down on two separate occassions: once, in 2000, when it was a juvenile lockup, and again post-Katrina, when it re-opened as an emergency warehouse for inmates transplanted from New Orleans.  On both occasions, allegations of racism and abuse spurred investigations.

The prison outside Jena is now being expanded by GEO Corps, the same outfit in charge of the infamous Coke County Juvenile Justice Center in West Texas that was recently closed after a rash of complaints reached the right ears.  It should be noted that what Texans now call “The TYC scandal” was sparked by the investigative reporting of Nate Blakeslee, the young man Friends of Justice alerted to the Tulia story seven years ago.

It should also be remembered that charges of graft and political corruption accompanied the construction the prison west of Tulia, Texas and the repeatedly-closed facility outside Jena, Louisiana.  The infamous Graham brothers from Houston were involved in the machinations surrounding the construction of both facilities.  One of the Grahams exposed Edwin Edwards to an investigation that eventually placed the former Louisiana governor in federal prison for ten years.  In an attempt to limit his own criminal liability for prison-related misdeeds in Texas, Patrick Graham told the feds that Edwards had received generous kick-backs in exchange for greenlighting the prison project in Jena. 

After going down the river, Graham implored authorities to let him out of the Texas Gulag because prison was “a cramped, lonesome place.”  That’s called irony.

In other words, investigate issues like juvenile justice and prison contracts in Texas and Louisiana and you find yourself knee-deep in scandal.  Fortunately for mass incarceration buffs, nobody ever pays much attention.

The new Jena prison will hold illegal aliens.  A picture in a recent issue of the Jena Times featured a dozen shovel-wielding local white business and political leaders eager to cash in on the jobs and economic activity prisons initially bring to isolated communities.  How long will it be before yet another cycle of scandal engulfs Jena’s oft-requited love affair with the criminal justice business?

TYC ombudsman urges closure of second youth prison

© 2007 The Associated Press

AUSTIN — An ombudsman for the Texas Youth Commission recommended closing a North Texas youth prison because of conditions including dangerous buildings, meager programming and understaffing.

Will Harrell’s report described the Victory Field Correctional Academy in Vernon as the “the least adequate” of any he’d visited since he took the job in May.

“If I were king, I’d shut it down today,” Harrell said after testifying in front of the House Corrections Committee on Wednesday. “It’s an incredibly violent campus. … There’s just this sense of fear and intimidation.”

Harrell told committee members that the Vernon facility was the TYC prison most similar to the Coke County Juvenile Justice Center in West Texas. The agency closed that lockup this month and fired its private operator after Harrell reported terrible conditions there.

The Victory Field report was part of a daylong hearing covering reforms and continuing problems at the Youth Commission, which was placed in state conservatorship this spring after a sex abuse scandal and subsequent cover-up.

Harrell’s report said buildings at the state-run Vernon facility are “structurally suffering, dangerous and unclean, staff morale is low, youth are idle and agitated, programming is meager … and there is a serious understaffing and training issue.”

Dimitria Pope, the Youth Commission’s acting executive director, said she had not seen a copy of Harrell’s report, which was distributed to committee members before Wednesday’s meeting. But she said she wasn’t in total agreement with Harrell’s assessment of Victory Field.

“I personally have gone to Victory Field myself and had some concerns about the physical structure,” Pope said. “I’m not saying it’s an ideal place … but there’s not feces, there’s not problems with plumbing that I saw (at Coke County).”

Pope said any problems will be addressed after the facility is inspected next week.

Harrell’s report described “huge blind spots” in the security camera system, including an area that inmates said they had used for sexual acts, fights and tattooing.

Other problems were a lack of access from the facility’s phones to the TYC hot line for students to report abuse, and youth complaints of staff retaliation when they file grievances.

State Rep. Drew Darby, a San Angelo Republican who represents Coke County, said the problems at Victory Field look similar to those at the facility that was recently closed.

“If those conditions exist, this facility certainly needs to be looked at and held to the same standards that they used in Coke County,” he said.

Pope said there could be more problems uncovered at the Youth Commission as officials work to overhaul the agency.

“I can’t say we’ve reached the core of all the issues,” she said.

http://www.katc.com/Global/story.asp?S=7236750

ALEXANDRIA, La. — Two of the “Jena Six” defendants helped present the Video of the Year award on Black Entertainment Television’s Hip Hop Awards.

Katt Williams, a comedian and host of the show broadcast Thurdsay night, introduced Carwin Jones and Bryant Purvis as two of the students involved in a case of “systematic racism.”

“By no means are we condoning a six-on-one beat-down,” Williams said during his introduction of the teens, accused of knocking a white student unconscious and then kicking and stamping on him. “… But the injustice perpetrated on these young men is straight criminal.”

Attempted murder charges against each defendant charged as an adult have been reduced to aggravated second-degree battery at arraignment; Purvis is the only one yet to be arraigned.

Jones and Purvis got a standing ovation as they walked onto the stage at the Atlanta Civic Center, where the awards show was filmed on Saturday. “They don’t look so tough, do they?” Williams joked.

Both Jones and Purvis thanked a number of people, including family, friends, the “Hip-Hop Nation” and the thousands who participated in a march and rally in their small hometown.

Purvis said the Sept. 20 rally proved “our generation can unite and rally around a cause.”

Purvis handed Kanye West the award for his video for “Stronger.” West shook hands with both teens.

Some people commenting on BET’s Web site have criticized the appearance, saying the teens _ accused of knocking Justin Barker unconscious and then stamping on and kicking him until another student intervened _ shouldn’t be made celebrities. “If anything, they should be humbled and go home and not be trying to get celebrity status off a tragedy,” one person wrote.

Another wrote, “this is what I was protesting for! So that later you could show up at the BET awards and style and profile?”

Tina Jones, Purvis’ mother, said BET contacted the Jena Six families to come to the awards show “to get away for a relaxing weekend.”

Also attending were Mychal Bell’s father, Marcus Jones; Carwin Jones’ parents, John Jenkins and Dwanda Jones; and Theo McCoy, the father of Theo Shaw, another defendant.

“You can’t get caught up in what people say,” Tina Jones said. “They are going to say something no matter what you do.”

She said her son was most excited about meeting rappers Birdman and Lil Wayne.

Bill Furlow, a spokesman for LaSalle Parish District Attorney Reed Walters, said the boys had a judge’s permission to attend the ceremony.

Purvis’ attorney, Darrell Hickman, declined to comment about his client’s appearance and said he doesn’t know of any others scheduled in the future. Neither Carwin Jones’ attorney, Mike Nunnery, nor Barker’s family returned calls Thursday.

Mychal Bell, who was 16 at the time of the Dec. 4 attack, is the only defendant tried so far. He was tried as an adult, but a state appeal court ruled that aggravated battery is not a charge on which a juvenile can be tried as adult and returned his case to juvenile court.

Purvis, Carwin Jones, Robert Bailey and Theo Shaw all were 17 at the time of the attack, and legally adult in Louisiana. The sixth defendant’s case has been in juvenile court all along.

Bell is currently at the Renaissance Home for Youth in Alexandria, the Rev. B.L. Moran of Jena said.

Bell had spent almost 10 months in a LaSalle Parish adult jail before he was released on bail last month. Two weeks later, he was sent back to juvenile custody for 18 months because a judge found he had violated terms of his probation for a previous juvenile conviction.

This is not the first time John McWhorter, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute who is usually introduced as a black conservative, has weighed in on the Jena story.  In a September 20th column in the New York Sun, he characterized the noose hanging as a prank–malicious but not deadly.  On the other hand, he hung the racist epithet around the neck of DA Reed Walters because the prosecutor responded to student protests with a bizarre threat.  McWhorter’s facts are a bit off in places, but, after watching the clownish Jason Whitlock swallow every morsel of misinformation the white folks in Jena served up for him, it is gratifying to see a black conservative who is capable of independent thought. 

A month after the big march, John McWhorter returns to the subject of Jena with these reflections on symbols of hate.  I pasted McWhorter’s piece right after Pat McCollough’s personal story for a reason.  When you work for the Manhattan Institute you have little to fear from people who hang nooses and spray paint swastikas; others are not so fortunate.

Walking Away From Hate

BY JOHN McWHORTER
October 18, 2007

A modest proposal. The next time somebody plants a noose, let’s just ignore it.

Really. No press conferences, no news stories. Nothing.

I suggest this not because I don’t understand the importance of fighting racism. I’m right with everybody else in considering Reed Walters, the district attorney in Jena, to deserve resistance and condemnation.

I also am quite aware of what nooses symbolize.

I suggest this for a simple reason. Walking on by might be the way to tamp down this expression of racism, rather than going nuts every time someone pulls it.

After all, you can reverse the decisions of a Reed Walters and hopefully fire him. But these nooses lately are different.

Right now we’re in the aftermath of the one hung on the door of Madonna Constantine, a professor at Columbia’s Teacher’s College. The nooses hung from a tree in Jena were just last year. Some may recall the noose hung at a cable company’s headquarters in Nassau County last December. This summer two people in the Coast Guard found nooses planted among their possessions. Just this past weekend someone scrawled the N-word on a bench at a Staten Island high school, which is really the same kind of thing.

There is no evidence that a sententious brouhaha after each of these events has any preventative effect. Rather, they just keep coming. Obviously, the kinds of people who do things like this aren’t reached by sonorous statements about civility. They’re like spam.

Mind you, there are times when a brouhaha makes a certain sense. Don Imus’ temporary banishment did, because it could actually be construed as an effective battle against expressions of racism. Talk show hosts will now be more careful about what they say, out of a desire not to lose their jobs. Mr. Imus is only being rehired because his superstar status brings in so much ad revenue; smaller fish could be beached forever.

But even there, they only could be, and if even Mr. Imus had been allowed to just stay put, all the dutiful condemnation would have been enough to warn others in his line.

And the fact remains that meanwhile, noose-hanging pranksters in the night, however revolting, cannot be stopped by mere words. The words, in fact, only encourage them.

Some bored little piece of trash hangs a noose one morning, and spends the rest of the week watching his deed make national news on the internet and get discussed on the top talk shows. He and his friend do a high-five, while some similarly-minded web-surfing scum across the country decides he wants to do something like that too.

And as to the white kids in Jena who hung the nooses, even if they had been expelled, it wouldn’t have stopped whoever hung the noose at Teacher’s College, who apparently left no traces, as is the usual situation in such cases.

Imagine if after the Jena incident, black kids had just taken the nooses down and kept on hanging out under that tree. Why is that such an unthinkable alternative to shouting it to the rooftops only to watch similar things keep happening nationwide anyway?

Thus my suggestion that we just walk on by. I admire Professor Constantine’s assertion that she will not be cowed. However, might we take a deep breath and take a new tack that might actually have an effect?

Let’s say next month there is a noose hung from the mast of a black man’s yacht in Key West. Say nothing. In February some sniggering jackanapes writes the N-word in the dirt in front of a black schoolteacher’s apartment in Tuscon after she gives him a bad grade. Nothing.

And nothing after a black guy finds a little noose hanging from his rear-view mirror for no reason he can think of in Savannah next summer.

If these dregs of society couldn’t get such a rise out of us and the media, they very well might eventually knock it off. Not immediately. But if anyone thinks that if it never made news there would have no effect at all, it’s they who have some explaining to do.

And I take it that in the meantime, individual black people will not pretend that some rope or word harms them psychologically. I presume black pride means something — i.e. that we have it. My proposal is designed to stop the pranksters, not to medicate us — because I presume we need no medication.

If anyone hung a noose from my door, I’d mention it to some friends and family, but that’s it. I wouldn’t mention it in this column, because soon the media would be doing stories about it and the perpetrators would be doing their high-five. I have a job, a piano, a kitchen, families, a life. “Symbols”?

With sincere respect to Professor Constantine, I would feel uncomfortable implying that there was even any question as to whether someone imposing some “symbol” on me could actually make me feel bad.

The jerks press the button and watch black people go “Ack!” time and again, while the media exploit it for viewership. You get two for one: weakness plus only encouraging more nooses. Great!

Hence my modest proposal. The next time — and there will be one, and another, and another — let it go. Not because it’s okay, but because that is the way to discourage it from happening.

Isn’t that what we were going for?

Mr. McWhorter is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Pat McCollough’s personal story originally appeared as a comment.  I asked Pat if I could post it because it provides a poignant answer to those who dismiss the significance of hate crimes.  How should we respond to a noose or a swastika?  Or is this about “should”?  We respond how we respond.  Some shug and move on; others are devastated, and the fine details of our personal histories usually determine the emotional impact.  You can find a picture of the graffiti Pat references here.

_________

I am Pat McCollough, a retired United States Marine Sergeant Major, also known around campus as, “Coach Pat.” I returned to the education industry at my alma mater, Hawthorne Middle/High School; this was a dream come true. My dream turned into a nightmare when I became the victim of a hate crime.

On 1 Jun 2007, the last day of school, I fell prey to racial discrimination and a victim of hate. This happened on campus during the school day. My classroom was the only one spray painted with hate graffiti, K.K.K. and a Swastika symbol. My vehicle was also spray painted with similar graffiti.

One student has been identified as the suspect. It has never been explained or investigated why this student was out of class and allowed to just roam around campus without a pass or any supervision. This was final exam day.

The administration was very passive about the entire situation. They gave the impression that even though the incident was identified by the local police as a “criminal act” or maybe “just a prank,” they had not taken into consideration how the entire event must have traumatized me as a human being. They stated that they must have misread me because I was a pillar of strength and so well composed though out the entire situation. Well, isn’t that how Christian professionals are suppose to respond.

If this type of racial behavior continues and is condoned with little or no consequences for the real criminals, someone is going to get seriously hurt…remember Jena 6? I wonder if those three nooses hanging on the tree traumatized any of the students or were they provided with any type of professional psychological counseling after having been subjected to such hate. I requested professional psychological counseling and was denied at two different levels. I had to eventually seek professional counseling through other resources outside of the school district. The local community also turned a deaf hear to my cry; even the NAACP.

It is a known fact there is a current issue with safety and security within the Alachua County School District, Gainesville, Florida. From my research, there are many other schools throughout the Nation facing similar incidents.

I did not return to teaching this year.

Still Hurting,Pat McCollough

Clarence Page offers some helpful suggestions regarding the recent spate of noose hangings in America.  He may be a tad cavalier about the emotional damage a hanging noose can do, but his words of caution are helpful. 

Al Sharpton suggested, in the course of the House Judiciary Committee Jena hearings, that the impact of Jim Crow racism hasn’t changed in America.  James Crow Jr., he remarked, is simply a slicker version of the older version, but the effect is the same.

I disagree.  The effect of the New Jim Crow is not the same as the old variety.  For one thing, the New Jim Crow impacts poor people in a disproportionate way–the Old Jim Crow applied to all black people equally.  While the fortunes of most black people in America are undoubtedly brighter than they were in the fifties (a point Mr. Page makes in this column), the lot of poor black males is much worse than it once was. 

Clarence Page references the Cosby-Sharpton rift I mentioned in a recent post, and comes to the same conclusion I arrived at: both men represent half the truth.  I would like to see the Chicago Tribune columnist expand on these ideas in future columns.