Editor’s Note: E. King Alexander, Jr., the author of this post, is a Louisiana, California, and Texas attorney engaged in indigent defense in Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana. He currently serves, with Julie Hayes Kilborn, as Co-Chair of the Amicus Committee of LACDL.  Before dedicating himself to indigent defense, King focused on civil litigation including intellectual properties and was a longtime professional musician.

But for the celebrity of the defendant, the prosecution of 38-year-old Corey Miller in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana for second-degree murder would have been a fairly typical one. The defendant grew up in the Calliope (now B. W. Cooper) Housing Project in New Orleans.  The fact that he is a globally-known rap recording artist, uncle of kiddie rapper Lil Romeo, and younger brother of Master P*, founder of No Limit Records, whom some readers may know best as the worst-ever hoofer on television’s Dancing With the Stars, complicated matters worse.  The icing on the cake was the fact that the defendant’s professional rapper name was, until 2005, “C-Murder.”  The media have refused to accept his change of stage moniker to “C-Miller”.  At least one of his prospective jurors last month admitted that the label “C-Murder” formed a part of his preconception of the case.  For the other, less-candid panelists, the unfortunate “gangsta” handle remained, according to Paul Purpura of the Times-Picayune, “the elephant in the room.”

The trial concerned the death by gunshot wound, when Miller was 31, of 16-year-old Steve Thomas in a Louisiana nightclub, the now-closed Platinum Room in Harvey, one of the levee-side communities on the west bank of the Mississippi River in Jefferson Parish. That is the same suburban jurisdiction that sent white nationalist David Duke to the Louisiana Legislature in 1989, setting him up for later, unsuccessful runs for the U.S. Senate and for governor of the state. The venue, Louisiana’s 24th Judicial District, is co-extensive with the parish, and is reputed to be the most political judicial district in the state.  Recent years have seen more than one of its judges trade the bench for felon status in corruption cases from fixing the child custody case of a wealthy contributor to taking kickbacks from a bail surety company in exchange for lowering bonds.

Last month’s trial was not the first in this case. A 2003 trial resulted in a unanimous verdict of guilty of second-degree murder. The defense followed with a new trial motion alleging the prosecution’s failure to disclose pertinent background information on three prosecution witnesses. Judge Martha Sassone agreed and granted the motion, but her decision’s vindication on review did not prevent her subsequent political defeat in a re-election bid in which the ruling was made a prominent issue. The shooting occurred on January 12, 2002, six days into the festive Mardi Gras carnival season which officially begins on Twelfth Night (January 6) of each year. Amid questions of what caused the altercation, described as Thomas being beaten by “a throng of men,” and how the juvenile victim came to be in a nightclub where the legal age was twenty-one, there was conflicting testimony, including one witness who would claim that he and not Miller had been the shooter. (more…)

As this article from the San Antonio Express-News suggests, Rick Perry wasn’t responsible for channelling federal funds toTom Coleman and the Panhandle Regional Narcotics Trafficking Task Force.  That was the work of Governor George W. Bush.  As president, Mr. Bush learned from his mistake and worked hard to diminish the Byrne Grant Program.  Unfortunately, Democrats have done more to demagogue the drug war (and the counterproductive largesse it spawns) than Republicans.  Barack Obama appears to be upholding that dismal tradition. 

As the article notes, Rick Perry recently made dark threats about pulling the Lone Star State out of the Union (while currying favor with Neo-Confederate secessionists with dog whistle digs at the federal government).  The Governor then backed up the tough talk by turning down $550 million in federal unemployment compensation funds. 

Now Mr. Perry is busy ingratiating himself with a wide variety of law enforcement entities by selectively doling out $90 million from Obama’s newly-expanded Byrne Grant program.  Unlike the unemployed, police officers vote.  Law enforcement is one big government program that still enjoys broad support among conservatives.

Selective socialism pays off big at election time.

Kay Bailey Hutchison, Perry’s Republican rival for Governor, is charging Perry with hypocrisy, but I doubt she has the courage to critique the Byrne program.  Here’s the sad thing: Barack Obama, a big fan of HBO’s The Wire, knows the war on drugs is a pork barrell policy failure but every Democratic president needs to pad his tuff-on-crime credentials.  Sausage-making ain’t pretty.

The Arlington School Board has bowed to the will of a socially prominent minority.  White folks in Arlington don’t want their kids exposed to a stay-in-school pep talk delivered by a black Democrat.

If we needed additional evidence that Arlington faces a racial divide this ought to do it. 

Reaction from Arlington’s minority community has been swift and defiant.  Luis Castillo, president of the League of Latin American Citizens (LULAC) released a scathing statement this morning: (more…)

We dare not bury the past while the past buries the innocent.

(This post is part of a series concerning Curtis Flowers, an innocent man convicted of a horrific crime that has divided a small Mississippi town.  Information on the Flowers case can be found here.)

In July, 1996, four people were killed execution style at a Montgomery County furniture store: owner Bertha Tardy, bookkeeper Carmen Rigby, and two hired men, Bobo Stewart and Robert Golden.  Golden was black, the other three victims were white.  Six months later, Curtis Flowers, a young black Winona resident who had worked three days for Bertha Tardy, was arrested and charged with the brutal murder of four innocent people.  Thirteen years, $300,000 and five trials later, Mr. Flowers remains behind bars and the state has been unable to obtain a final conviction.

No capital defendant in American history has ever gone to trial six times on the same facts.  Curtis Flowers of Winona, Mississippi will soon be the first.

Winona is county seat of Montgomery County, a section of Mississippi that periodically produces startling narratives. (more…)

Cameron Todd Willingham was executed in 2004 for allegedly setting the fire in which his children died.  David Grann dissected this dreadful prosecution in a 17-page article in the New Yorker.  For the time-challenged, Dahlia Lithwick has produced the Cliff Notes version of the case in Slate:  “The entire prosecution was a train wreck of eyewitness testimony that changed over time: a jailhouse snitch who was both mentally impaired and stood to benefit from testifying against Willingham, “expert” psychiatrists who never examined the accused but proclaimed him a “sociopath” based on his posters and tattoos, and local arson investigators whose conclusions were less rooted in science than a sort of spiritual performance art. And at every step in his appeals process, Willingham’s repeated claims of innocence were met with the response that he’d already had more than enough due process for a baby-killer.” (more…)

Van Jones has resigned as President Obama’s special adviser on Green Jobs.  He says he didn’t want political flak about his past to interfere with the administration’s agenda. 

Criticism of the photogenic activist has come from a variety of sources but Glenn Beck of Fox News appears to be the muck-raker in chief.  According to the egregious Beck, Jones once accused George W. Bush of planning the 9-11 attacks, made derogatory remarks about Republicans prior to his appointment and has been associated with an anti-capitalist peace organization.

I have only met Van Jones on one occasion.  We were both speaking at a progressive conference in Washington D.C.; I was on a panel on new media and Jones gave a keynote address at the banquet that opened the gathering.  He was talking about the environment.  If you have heard Al Gore lecture on the subject you get the message–it was standard issue environmentalism.  The young people at my table looked up to Jones and were thrilled to be in the same room with the man.  (more…)

Gordon Bean spent the last few years of his life in a Canadian hospital.  Diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease, my dad gradually lost control of his muscles.  His mother died exactly the same way, hunched over in a wheelchair.  Whether I will suffer the same fate remains to be seen, but it’s something I think about.

For me . . . for all of us, the health care debate is personal.  The picture at the left shows Gordon Bean as a young man; it was taken before I was born.  I like to remember dad as the guy in the picture;  it’s the way he would like to be remembered. 

We often speak of the naive and innocent as “boy scouts”.  My dad was an innocent in that sense, but he was also a genuine boy scout.  The adolescent Gordon Bean worked his way to the rank of King’s Scout (the Canadian equivalent of an Eagle Scout).  He loved to fish, camp, canoe–all that good scout stuff and kept his scouting medals in a little cardboard box.  Loyalty, consistency, dedication; all the virtues we generally ascribe to the World War II generation apply to my father in triplicate.

Dad was a mix of diverse ideological elements.  His religion was conservative and literal, verging on fundamentalism.  His politics were liberal; some might say socialist.  He picked up the religious conservatism and the political radicalism at the same place: Calvary Baptist Church in Weyburn, Saskatchewan.  My father’s pastor, Sunday school teacher and lifelong mentor was T.C. (Tommy) Douglas, best known these days as the father of Canadian Medicare. (more…)

(This post is part of a series concerning Curtis Flowers, an innocent man convicted of a horrific crime that has divided a small Mississippi town.  Information on the Flowers case can be found here.)

In 1962, Montgomery County, Mississippi could still boast that not a single Negro had registered to vote or paid the poll tax.  Tom Scarborough of the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission took great comfort in this statistic and checked periodically with County officials to reassure himself that it was still so.

But in the early days of 1963, neither Scarborough nor the civic leaders he interviewed in Winona were finding it easy to sleep at night.  The Freedom Rides of 1961were the first sign that Mississippi’s “massive resistance” to integration was running up against massive resistance of a different sort.  Then black college students from nearby LeFlore County started preaching civil rights from Winona pulpits and asking to be served at the segregated Stacey’s restaurant at the Winona bus station.  Winona had its Negroes under control,  but thirty miles to the west, the cotton town of Greenwood was in turmoil.

There had been a long history of civil rights agitation in the Mississippi Delta where blacks outnumbered whites three to one.  But when strange characters like the bookish Bob Moses (pictured above) and yarmulke-wearing James Bevel started speaking in Greenwood’s churches something new was afoot.  (more…)

Lewis Carroll (aka Charles Dodgson) charmed the readers of Alice in Wonderland by placing logical fallacies in the mouths of bizarre characters.  Poor Alice is barraged on every side by convoluted absurdities from twisted character like the March Hare, Tweedle Dum and Tweedly Dee and the Red Queen. 

Alice in Wonderland comes to mind whenever I think of Alvin Clay.  The Little Rock attorney has spent the past seven years knocking down the government’s house of cards only to see the structure rebuilt before his eyes.   (Those who are not familiar with the story should consult this summary, written shortly before Clay’s June 2008 trial.  To put it simply, the government of the United States has been using unsustainable allegations to strike back at an uppity attorney who didn’t know his place. (more…)

Since this post was published, the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee says the U.S. Justice Department is investigating this incident–story pasted at bottom of this post.

Sumner, Mississippi in Tallahatchie County is best known as the town where Emmett Till was lynched for whistling at a white woman.  Now Sumner is back in the news (just barely) after County Attorney John Whitten III (the son of the attorney who successfully defended Till’s killers) organized an vigilante posse on August 20th (armed, some say, with guns and two armored tanks allegedly owned by a local survivalist group) to hunt down two young black men accused of robbing a local home.   (The courthouse in Sumner is pictured at the left.)

Thus far there  are two versions of the story: a brief article in the Jackson Clarion-Ledger (that says little apart from the fact that U.S. Rep. Bennie Sanders is asking the Attorney General to investigate) and a sensational account currently circulating in the blogosphere suggesting that little has changed in Tallahatchie County since the Emmett Till days.  An excellent blog dedicated to the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission addresses both sides of the story and suggests that an FBI probe is already underway.

As always, the comments at the end of the various stories are more entertaining than the text and raise serious questions about the current state of race relations in Mississippi.

According to the unauthorized blog version of the story, Mr. Whitten “organized a militia of what could best be described as a lynch mob. Some of these men were actual law enforcement officers while others such as the case of an unidentified white maintenance man from Tutwiler, MS, simply wore a police uniform and was given a police car along with plenty of booze, guns and ammunition. Even the K-9 unit from the Department of Corrections at the notorious Parchman State Penitentiary was alerted for this mission. In addition to the man, fire and canine power, Whitten deployed two military tanks for the purpose of hunting down Mr. Will Pittman as well.”

August 29, 2009

Feds investigating Delta incident

From staff and wire reports

The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee says the U.S. Justice Department is investigating an incident in the Mississippi Delta in which he was told a mostly white group used weapons and “vigilante” techniques to search for a black burglary suspect.

The suspect, William Pittman, was charged Aug. 20 with breaking and entering a home in Sumner. He was released on bond the same day.

Second District U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, a Democrat who represents Tallahatchie County, on Thursday said he has asked the U.S. attorney general to investigate. He said his staff has received calls from concerned residents.

“Unauthorized people with guns, terrorizing citizens of this area has no place in civilized society,” Thompson said. “The fact that this community still (bears) the stains of racial tensions and is the area that Emmett Till was murdered weighs heavy on the conscience and fears of this community.”

Till, a Chicago teen who was visiting relatives in the area, was lynched in 1955.

Pittman’s father, attorney Ellis Pittman, said his son’s life was threatened by Tallahatchie County Prosecuting Attorney John Whitten.

Whitten, who is white and allegedly among the group, said the allegations are baseless.

The Justice Department says it’s aware of the case and the FBI says it’s reviewing it with other agencies.

The ACLU and the NAACP also are asking for an investigation.