Hutchinson: Juv Court “No Bargain” for Bell

Earl Ofari Hutchinson has some good commentary on DA Reed Walters’s decision, following Governor Blanco’s request, to abandon his plan to take the Third Court of Appeals decision on Mychal Bell’s case up to the Louisiana Supreme Court. Instead he will, in all likelihood, retry Bell in juvenile court. This may sound like progress, Hutchinson notes, but given what passes for justice in Louisiana’s juvenile courts, it’s not. The juvenile justice system in Louisiana, he explains, is “a broken, flawed, repressive system that emphasizes punishment, and not rehabilitation for teens.”

A few weeks ago, when Bell’s conviction was vacated, lead counsel Louis Scott drew on a football metaphor to explain what had happened. “We started the game down by a touchdown and a field goal,” he told the New York Times. “On September 4 [the day Bell's charges were reduced] we got the field goal. Today, we got the touchdown. Now, we get to start the game all over again.” The good news is that Bell will head into this “new game” with a much stronger defense and a national audience watching to make sure the refs are calling it fair.

Jena Prosecutor Defends His Prosecution

In prosecuting the Jena Six according to white law, LaSalle Parish District Attorney Reed Walters has done nothing wrong. So says LaSalle Parish District Attorney Reed Walters in this sneaky op-ed in today’s New York Times.

Walters spends several paragraphs explaining why he didn’t prosecute the noose-hangers–the intricacies of Louisiana statutes on hate crimes, as I’ve learned in researching the subject, do, indeed, make it difficult to mount such a case–but he doesn’t explain why he didn’t report the noose-hanging incident to the FBI, which keeps track of hate crimes and prosecutes them, when it sees fit, as a federal offense. What’s clear, in the way Walters handled the incident last year and in the way he explains himself today, is that he doesn’t regard the noose-hanging incident as a crime at all.

After he’s dispensed with the nooses, Walters moves on to explain how he perceives the fight. “Last week, a reporter asked me whether, if I had it to do over, I would do anything differently,” he writes.

I didn’t think of it at the time, but the answer is yes. I would have done a better job of explaining that the offenses of Dec. 4, 2006, did not stem from a “schoolyard fight” as it has been commonly described in the news media and by critics.

Conjure the image of schoolboys fighting: they exchange words, clench fists, throw punches, wrestle in the dirt until classmates or teachers pull them apart. Of course that would not be aggravated second-degree battery, which is what the attackers are now charged with. (Five of the defendants were originally charged with attempted second-degree murder.) But that’s not what happened at Jena High School.

What Walters fails to mention–and must mention if he intends to be forthright about his prosecution of this case–is that those five defendants were charged with attempted second-degree murder and conspiracy to commit the same. According to his argument, the Jena Six huddled together and agreed beforehand to kill Justin Barker. Now, I wasn’t there, so I don’t know for sure, but I suspect that’s not what happened at Jena High School, either. I think it’s more likely that Walters elevated the charge from battery to murder because that was the only way according to Louisiana law that he could try Mychal Bell, a juvenile at the time of the fight, as an adult. “I considered adult status appropriate because of his role as the instigator of the attack, the seriousness of the charge and his prior criminal record,” Walters writes. The Third Circuit Court of Appeals didn’t agree, and rightly overturned Bell’s conviction.

Walters is not backing down; that much is clear. And despite his obviously blinkered conception of justice, he hasn’t been recused from the case, nor has his partner, Judge J.P. Mauffray. That would require intervention from Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco. Blanco, a lame duck who has so far declined to get involved, has no choice by now. She is meeting today with Al Sharpton, who has called for an investigation of both Walters and Mauffray and for the restoration of justice. “We are not fighting for black kids that beat up white kids,” Sharpton has said. “We’re talking about the disparity in how the law works.”

Michigan Representative John Conyers, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, has also stepped in. He’s holding a forum on Friday at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Annual Legislative Conference to talk about Jena, and plans to schedule a hearing with the Judiciary Committee. “We’ve reached a point in history where this kind of situation is no longer tolerable,” Conyers said. Unfortunately, it seems that Walters has some catching up to do.

In Which Juvienation Confronts a Right-Wing Nutball

Boy, talk about a backlash! Last night I got roped into a twenty-minute on-air shouting match with Steve Malzberg, a rabid right-winger who hosts a talk show on an AM radio station in New Jersey. I’m still quaking.

I came on at 9:30, right after Malzberg wrapped up a rant about global warming. (Apparently, it’s a hoax.) I had done a little bit of homework on the guy–I had seen that the station he works for also features Bill O’Reilly and Michael Savage in its daily lineup, and I knew that if I wanted to read Malzberg’s opinions, I could check them out at the fringe-news website newsmax.com. But rather than steel myself for a run-in with a bully, which in hindsight I should have done, I spent the half-hour before the call brushing up on the Jena case. I had my facts straight, I had national statistics to back up my claims, and I had checked the wires to make sure I was up on the latest development. No need for any of that, as it turned out. Ronald Reagan (a hero to Malzberg, I’m sure) famously said, “facts are stupid things.” And in this case it was quite true.

I didn’t get a word in edgewise for the first two minutes. Instead I listened as Malzberg set me up for his listeners as a biased, thug-loving liberal whose sloppy reporting on Jena so distorted the picture as to leave readers with the impression that Mychal Bell and his “gang” were innocent. When he finally stopped yammering and it became clear that it was my turn to speak, I tried calmly to reframe the story so that it started where it begins; that is, with the nooses. I don’t give a damn about the nooses, he screamed. All he wanted to talk about was the beating. OK, so we talked about the beating on his terms, although talking isn’t quite the right way to describe what Malzberg does. He interrupts, he yells, he fulminates, he fumes–but he doesn’t talk. And he sure as hell doesn’t listen.

It didn’t matter what I said, in fact, because I was hardly given a chance to make a point, and whenever I did he dismissed it out of hand, or redirected the conversation elsewhere, or twisted my words, or fixed on one word, or held up my point as a reflection of “liberal” madness. By virtue of representing the left I was a priori wrong. And not just wrong but WRONG! At that level of discourse, facts are irrelevant.  It was an ideological slugfest, plain and simple. We may as well have been talking about tax policy, or healthcare, or Iraq.

I gotta hand it to him, though. He’s good at what he does. He brought me on to tear me down–and by extension anyone who, like me, has deigned to speak out against the Jena brand of justice. In a way I’m glad I went on, despite the abuse. I think it’s important in such situations to punch back, so to speak, and I did.

So did the Jena Six.

Jena: Two Backlashes

Over the weekend I detected two distinct backlashes in the Jena saga.

First is the backlash from racist copycats and full-fledged, card-carrying white supremacists. On Friday an 18-year-old named Jeremiah Munsen and his 16-year-old accomplice were arrested in nearby Alexandria, Louisiana, for parading around town (drunk) with two nooses hanging off the back of Munsen’s pickup truck. Also on Friday four nooses were found strung around campus at Andrews High School in High Point, North Carolina. And since Thursday’s rally in Jena neo-Nazi websites have been overflowing with vitriol; a particularly resourceful activist in Roanoke, Virginia, published the names and addresses and phone numbers of the Jena Six and encouraged fellow haters to “drag them out of the house.” The LaSalle Parish police have stepped up patrols, and the FBI has launched an investigation. It’s a troubling development, and should surely give pause to anyone who thinks that old-school racism is a problem that’s local to Jena.

The second, perhaps more interesting, development is the backlash from the media. We’ve clearly entered a contrarian phase where the frame shifts a bit and the picture gets muddier. Today the AP ran a long piece revisiting the case with skepticism and calling many of the “distorted” facts into question. The Chicago Tribune, whose Howard Witt has been on the story since the beginning, published an op-ed by Dawn Turner Trice titled “Jena 6 Case Isn’t Perfect, but It’s Clear” in which she acknowledged that justice was not being meted out equally in Jena but argued that the Jena Six may not be the best poster boys for civil rights version 2.0. “If you look at it straight on, it’s not totally clear-cut,” she writes. “And that’s true even if you’re not a presidential candidate who may be skittish about losing votes in key Southern states. The violence, the beating, complicate things, even though the case may appear black and white. Many of the 1950s and 1960s civil-rights era cases presented far more moral clarity. There were distinct rights and wrong with little overlap. You felt it in the gut.”

And speaking of poster children, Richard Thompson Ford has a piece in Slate called “The Wrong Poster Children” arguing that it’s “plausible” that the prosecution was motivated by a racialized sense of justice; that the protesters’ demand to “free the Jena Six” was inappropriate because “these young men weren’t exactly engaged in peaceful civil disobedience”; that you can’t compare the series of incidents leading up to the fight with the fight itself. Ford ends his piece wishing he knew more about the students who defied the school’s unwritten code by peacefully standing underneath the “whites-only” tree in a protest that reminds him of the civil rights era of the 1960s. Those students are the movement’s true symbols, he concludes. Unfortunately, “they have received so little attention that I don’t even know their names or how many such brave and defiant young people there were.” I know at least one of them, Mr. Ford. His name is Bryant Purvis, and he stands accused of aggravated second-degree battery.

Fighting the first backlash is a matter for the authorities. Fighting the second requires some rhetorical skill. It seems crucial to me to make sure that the story begins with those nooses, not with the fight. And to acknowledge that the Jena Six are not angels; they don’t have to be.

Breaking News: No Bail for Bell

AP reports that Mychal Bell has been denied bail in juvenile court. Melissa Bell, Mychal’s mother, left the courthouse in tears.

California Violates Parolees’ Rights

U.S. District Judge Lawrence Karlton ruled in a class action suit Wednesday that the State of California violates juvenile parole violators’ right to due process by holding them in custody for too long–sometimes for several months–before providing them with a hearing. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, the umbrella over the Division of Juvenile Justice, has been given one month to come into compliance. Which raises an interesting question: Given the CDCR’s proven incompetence when it comes to acting in a timely and responsible manner, what happens if (hell, I might even say when) the department breaks Karlton’s deadline?

New Report on Reforming Arkansas JJ Centers

More than 100 of the 143 inmates at the Alexander Juvenile Assessment and Treatment Center in Arkansas have no business being there, according to a new report. Almost all of them are misdemeanants or probation violators, low-level offenders who–instead of being treated as criminals and locked up with the state’s most violent offenders–would be better served in nonrestrictive environments closer to home, like treatment centers and community day programs. The report, written by some of the state’s top juvenile advocates, recommends that the center in Alexander be shut down and replaced with two forty-bed facilities for the small number of offenders who will need to remain confined. The authors cite Missouri’s success with a similar model, pointing out that state’s remarkably low rate of juvenile offenders (8 percent) who graduate to adult prison. Democratic State Senator Shane Broadway said he plans to introduce legislation next year to address the report’s proposals along with those of a legislative task force that is looking into similar reforms.

Walters and the “Villainous Act”

District Attorney Reed Walters–who threatened black students at a school assembly in Jena last fall that he could “take away your lives with the stroke of my pen”; who charged six teenage boys with attempted second-degree murder and conspiracy for getting into a school fight, claiming their sneakers were potentially lethal weapons; who continues to prosecute his case against Mychal Bell even after the Louisiana Third Circuit Court of Appeals has vacated Bell’s conviction; who in recent weeks has refused to talk to the press even as his case has captured the attention of newsmakers and citizens around the country–offered a pathetic self-exculpatory comment today on the three white students who hung the school-colored nooses that set this whole mess in motion: “I cannot overemphasize what a villainous act that was,” he told Richard G. Jones of the New York Times. “The people that did it should be ashamed of what they unleashed on this town.”

You did know, Mr. Walters, that you had the authority to prosecute that “villainous act” as a hate crime… didn’t you?

Snapshots From Jena

The New York Times, which had been unforgivably remiss on Jena coverage until yesterday, has finally gotten the memo. Richard G. Jones, the reporter who filed yesterday’s piece (which ended with a charged confrontation between Mychal Bell’s parents, Bryant Purvis’s mom and the Rev. P.A. Paul, who wrote off the nooses as “kid’s play”), has sent this lively update from today’s protests, which is posted on the Times blog The Lede. More to come, I’m sure.

Update: The Washington Post has produced an annotated photo gallery of the day’s events.

Edwards on Jena: Me Too!

Populist wonder boy John Edwards, who launched his presidential campaign in New Orleans with an attack on the Bush Administration’s criminally negligent response to Hurricane Katrina, has been inspiring voters on the campaign trail with a message defending the racial and economic underdogs in America. But he’s a little late arriving to the Jena Six protest: Just today he issued this statement, third in line behind fellow frontrunners Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.