Category: Curtis Flowers

Does banning the noose change anything?

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For the fourth straight year, Texas congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee has introduced an anti-noose bill.  The Noose Hate Crime Act of 201 stipulates that “Whoever, with intent to harass or intimidate any person because of that person’s race, color, religion, or national origin, displays a noose in public shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 2 years, or both.”

Hate crimes legislation, though admirable at first glance, raises serious First Amendment issues.  In practice, it will be difficult to prove that a specific noose hanger was motivated by a desire to “harass or intimidate”. 

Jackson Lee’s bill was first introduced as a response to the noose hanging in Jena Louisiana, but I’m not sure it would (or should) apply to that kind of situation.  What would have been gained by locking up the Jena noose hangers for two years?  Would this teach them a lesson they would never forget, or would it simply harden the racial resentment that motivated their act in the first place? (more…)

When the Devil plays God

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Byron De La Beckwith the younger

By Alan Bean

“The devil will sometimes play the part of God and let things happen.”  Byron De La Beckwith Jr.

The Jackson Clarion Ledger has published two articles stemming from an interview with Byron De La Beckwith Jr.  Byron II claims his father didn’t kill civil rights leader Medgar Evers in June of 1963. 

He said those behind Evers’ assassination belonged to the Citizens’ Council, which produced television shows in which “experts” declared that African-Americans were genetically inferior. He would not share the names of the men involved. He said they later joined the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, believed to be responsible for at least 10 killings in the 1960s.

 Jerry Mitchell reports that the FBI will be looking into De La Beckwith’s assertions, but I doubt new facts will emerge.  De La Beckwith, like his daddy, enjoys the limelight and intends to make the most of it.

More interesting, from my perspective, is Byron the Second’s description of his personal contribution to 1960s anti-civil rights terrorism and his sad reflections on the current status of the Mississippi Ku Klux Klan.  (more…)

Key witness in Flowers case sentenced to federal prison

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Patricia Hallmon's residence in Winona, MS

By Alan Bean 

The state’s key witness in the six (6) trials of Curtis Flowers will be spending the next three years in federal prison.

When the trial of Patricia Hallmon Sullivan was first reported in the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, her link to the Flowers case wasn’t mentioned.  Fortunately Jimmie E. Gates eventually connected the dots.

By coincidence, Patricia Hallmon Sullivan was represented by Mike Horan of Grenada, a former assistant to Doug Evans, the lead prosecutor in the Flowers case.  According to the Clarion-Ledger article (see below) Horan  told Barbour that Sullivan’s testimony led to Flowers’ convictions.

So it did.  Take Patricia Hallmon and her darling brother, Odell, out of the mix and the state’s case against Flowers fall apart.  (more…)

Major study examines prosecutorial misconduct

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By Alan Bean

In another sign that the American mainstream is taking notice of a broken system of justice, USA Today has published “Justice in the Balance“, a series of articles focusing on prosecutorial misconduct, particularly in the federal justice system.  The series began in September of last year and the most recent submission was posted on December 29, 2010.

According to writers Kevin McCoy and Brad Heath, “USA TODAY documented 201 cases since 1997 in which federal courts ruled that prosecutors had violated laws or ethics rules.  Some of these violations put innocent people in prison, but in at least 48 cases defendants were later convicted, then had their sentences reduced or were even set free . . . Although those represent a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands of federal criminal cases filed each year, the problems were so grave that judges dismissed indictments, reversed convictions or rebuked prosecutors for misconduct.” (more…)

“The Confessions”: Frontline highlights the case of the Norfolk Four

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I was out-of-town on a speaking engagement when “The Confessions” originally aired on Frontline.  I strongly urge you to watch the entire program online.  It won’t be a pleasant experience.  Listening to this twisted saga kept taking me back to the recent trial of Curtis Flowers–the stories are very different in some respects, but wrongful convictions follow a familiar pattern.

Two of the attorneys representing the defendents in this case, by the way, are Des Hogan and George Kendall, key members of the legal “Dream Team”  involved in the fight for justice in Tulia, Texas.

The story of the Norfolk Four revolves around aggressive interrogation, false confession, and prosecutorial tunnel vision.  Once the detectives responsible for the investigation latched onto a theory of the crime, they clung to it tenaciously–facts be damned. (more…)

Does Mississippi want a civil rights museum?

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The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. (front left) walked in the funeral procession for Medgar Evers in June 1963. Evers was shot and killed in the driveway of his home in Jackson, Miss.
The funeral procession of Medgar Evers

Does the state of Mississippi really want a civil rights museum?

 This intriguing article by Sheila Byrd of the Washington Post suggests not.
 
State Senator David Jordan, a black Democrat from Greenwood in Leflore County, certainly isn’t convinced. “It comes to a point that I don’t think Mississippi wants her history clearly told,” he told Byrd.
 
State Senator Hillman Frazier, a Democrat from Jackson, also has his doubts.  Governor Hailey Barbour initially embraced the idea of building a civil rights museum, but has done little to make it happen.  “It’s very frustrating when you’re visiting Memphis and Birmingham,” Frazier told the WP, “and they’re telling Mississippi’s history when we’re ground zero for civil rights.” (more…)

“Support the poor, or go to hell”

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Over at Religious Dispatches, Daniel Schultz takes the religious Left to task for being too nice.  Here’s a teaser:

“I’ve been asked a lot over the course of this fall why we don’t have a politically effective religious left in America. The short answer is that there’s a significant trade-off between being nice (or engaging in “civil discourse,” as it’s called these days) and being potent. All the commitment to moral suasion, to building consensus, to reconciliation between political opponents, all the commitment in the world to “speaking out” about your values isn’t going to accomplish squat.”

Pastor Dan’s “support the poor, or go to hell” theme is one of several semi-serious suggestions for giving progressive religious messaging some much-needed bite. (more…)

Making a stand in Grenada

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Making a stand in Granada, MS

This is the 4th installment of a series.  The first three segments can be found here, here and here. 

By Alan Bean

In 1962, when Doug Evans was attending junior high school in Grenada, Mississippi, a black man named James Meredith enrolled at the University of Mississippi sparking days of riots aided and abetted by Mississippi State Troopers. Four years later, when Doug Evans was in high school in Grenada, James Meredith launched a march against fear, heading south from Memphis to Jackson. Shortly after setting out, Meredith was shot in the leg by a sniper and was unable to continue. Civil Rights leaders like Martin Luther King and Stokely Carmichael rushed to Mississippi to pick up where Meredith had left off.

When the marchers arrived in Grenada on June 15, 1966, City Manager John McEachin explained the situation to a reporter: “All we want is to get these people through town and out of here. Good niggers don’t want anything to do with this march. And there are more good niggers than sorry niggers.” (more…)

90 year-old jurist gives up on the death penalty

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Justice John Paul Stevens

By Alan Bean

Retired Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens was never enthusiastic about the death penalty.  Like a lot of Americans, he believed that some violent crimes are so horrific that capital punishment is the only appropriate response.  This abstract support for ultimate penalty was rooted in the assumption that the American criminal justice system is capable, first, of restricting capital prosecution to the very worst sort of crime, and, second, that with a man’s life at stake, jurors would hold prosecutors to the highest evidentiary standard: proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

Justice Stevens is still outraged by egregious acts of wanton violence, but he no longer trusts prosecutors to single out the very worst crimes for capital prosecution.  Moreover, he realizes that, in far too many cases, the more shocking the details of a crime, the lower the evidentiary standard becomes.  The intense desire to see justice done in a particular case easily trumps human reason and the principle of equal justice under law.  This is particularly true, Stevens discovered, when the defendant is black and the murder victim is white. (more…)

Racial resentment and the Mississippi mainstream

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By Alan Bean

CCC Carroll AcademyThe Council of Conservative Citizens was founded in 1985 to: (1) defend white culture, and (2) raise money for financially strapped segregation academies. 

Trent Lott got into big trouble in 1998 when it leaked out that he had addressed a CCC fundraiser in Blackhawk Mississippi several years earlier. 

Doug Evans, the man who has taken Curtis Flowers to trial six times on the same evidence, was a regular on the CCC circuit in the early 1990s. 

State Senator Lydia Chassaniol (who is based in Mr. Flowers’ home town of Winona) is a proud member of the CCC and spoke to the organization’s annual conference in Jackson, MS in the summer of 2009. 

The Council of Conservative Citizens rose from the ashes of the old Citizens Councils which sprang to life in 1954 to oppose the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education ruling.  Alexander vs. Holmes County, the case that finally ended segregated public schooling in the South in 1969, was filed in the heart of Mississippi’s segregation academy belt.  If a county’s black population exceeds 20% in Mississippi you will find segregation academies. (more…)