Good news and bad news

28 thoughts on Good news and bad news

1. Pingback: Good news and bad news « my place

2. The fact Reed hasn’t been Nifonged yet is astounding.

   Not really. The Jena 6 don’t have nearly the legal and financial (not to mention social) resources that the Duke defendants did.

3. Right, the classism/racism in this country is astounding!

4. Why would Reed be Nifonged? Tell me, since when has the establishment started giving a hoot about the rights of anyone other than those of their tribe?

5. Oh mercy. Let’s not start again.

   Duke guys were set up. Nifong lied. Leave it at that.

   Yeah, they had money. Good for them they had money, seeing how the entire Durham system would have railroaded them otherwise. And though you may hate them, though you may resent them, their case at least will make the movers and shakers on the Durham legal shithole rethink itself. That effects everyone…

   …until the voting public re-elects the very same morons who made this happen. Which they did. Whoops.

   Oh, and lest I hijack this, this DA deserves to be dumped in the Nifong looney-bin.

6. (FWIW, I lived the first 18 years of my life outside of Durham. I know.)

7. I didn’t start anything. Nifong was Nifonged.

8. Oh, not referring to you. Or anyone, really. Just…in general.

   Helpful hint for DAs: Dump the vendettas. Please. For the defendants’ sake, for the fucking tax-paying public’s sake. It’s a non-starter that will only end in tears, I promise.

9. smartpatrol, he was taken off the Duke case and jailed for a day because he supposedly had an agenda. Reed has a racist history and agenda.

10. Though the DA was unfair to them in that he overcharged the defendants, and ignored what white students had done, I thought that the weight of the evidence showed that the Jena Six did stomp Justin Barker at school one day.

11. BlackAmazon has a fantastic post up about this. And she reminded me of this:

    This is what happens when a DA is allowed to leverage PRIOR crimes against current ones.

    When he siaid that with a stroke of the pen he could wipe away their lives.

    He wasn’t kidding.

12. Hector, I won’t go into the case any more.

    Let’s just talk about this freak using priors as leverage.

13. Though the DA was unfair to them in that he overcharged the defendants, and ignored what white students had done, I thought that the weight of the evidence showed that the Jena Six did stomp Justin Barker at school one day.

    It’s easy to understand why you’d think that, given the reporting on this case. There’s been a lot of under-the-radar reporting that shows that the Jena Six was more likely the Jena One or maybe Two, and there’s no way to really know which one or two it was who did the stomping. Add in that if the DA–had the people of the town of Jena–done anything to the white kids who started this whole mess and nipped it in the bud, then maybe the fight wouldn’t have happened in the first place. As I said on my blog a while back, the Jena Six didn’t beat that kid’s ass–the town of Jena beat that kid’s ass.

14. Slight quibble – there is no U.S. Sentencing Court. I think you’re referring to the U.S. Sentencing Commission.

15. Let’s just talk about this freak using priors as leverage.

    Fine. As a football star with prior convictions, Mychal Bell seems to have the most to lose from being convicted — possible college scholarship, longer prison term than if this had been a first offense. Therefore he’s highly motivated to testify to whatever he thinks the DA wants him to say. To be fair to all, the DA should have offered immunity to the least culpable of the accused, the one least motivated to lie.

16. As I said on my blog a while back, the Jena Six didn’t beat that kid’s ass–the town of Jena beat that kid’s ass.

    Wrong. Those fists and feet were at the ends of arms and legs that belonged to specific human beings, who deserve to be punished.

    How much punishment they deserve is certainly debatable, and no one can argue that the DA’s attitude needs adjusting. But to cast every one of the “Jena Six” as victims is wrongheaded. If my kid had been beaten up like that, you can bet I’d want the thugs who did it to serve some time, no matter what their color.

17. If my kid had been beaten up like that, you can bet I’d want the thugs who did it to serve some time, no matter what their color.

    I’m sure the parents of the black kid who was beaten up by white kids would have liked to see some jail time for the perps, but they didn’t get it. Funny, that.

18. Not really. The Jena 6 don’t have nearly the legal and financial (not to mention social) resources that the Duke defendants did.

    They’ve got the press coverage, though. The Duke Lacrosse players really had to buy the advocates to get their story across, especially since the initial public response was an assumption that they were guilty. Also, they did not, in fact, commit the crime they were charged with.

    Also, according to an article in the Chicago Trib (cited in the wiki… I have not closely followed this case), their legal defense fund has raised $500k in donations, though the lawyers who have ably represented Bell say they have not been paid, and one of the six posted pictures of himself on MySpace waving around stacks of hundred-dollar bills.

    Anyway, unlike the defendants in the Duke case, it looks like the Jena 6 did, in fact, beat and stomp this kid. I’m looking at the wikipedia entry for my chronology.

    I think the decision to charge the juveniles as adults was incorrect, but I understand that has been reversed, and it was, in any case, the judge’s decision. I think the attempted murder charge was excessive, but those have been reduced to aggravated battery and conspiracy, and it says the DA let Bell plead to only battery. If he’s offerring battery to all six defendants, that seems fair. The difference between the charge for the white male who punched Bailey with his fist at the Barn fight (simple battery) and the aggravated battery charge that the Jena 6 face for stomping on Justin Barker’s head does not seem out of line at all.

    The more outrageous charge is the charge of theft of a firearm and conspiracy to commit robbery, which two of the six and a third individual were charged with after a confrontation in which a white student threatened them with a gun, and they wrestled it away from him. Based on media accounts of those facts, I think charges should have been brought against the white student, and they should probably be dropped against the black students, if they haven’t been already.

    The white guy’s account is apparently that the was jumped and mugged by the three black kids as he entered the store. That one sounds really fishy. It really strains credulity that he was out minding his own business, with his shotgun.

19. Also, with regard to the sentencing decisions, I think that the disparity between powder and crack was not rationally justifiable, and should not have lasted as long as it did, considering that the chemical similarities between the two drugs and the racial disparities between the users of those drugs.

    However, I am a strong advocate of the availability of severe sentences for drug criminals. While we have theoretical ideals that a punishment should fit a crime, there’s a lot of subjectivity in what is appropriate as a sentence, and in many cases, that subjectivity should guide judges to harsh sentences, because a lot of people convicted of drug crimes are bad guys.

    This kind of thinking has been around for a long time. In 1920s, Chicago, nobody could lay a hand on Al Capone. Eliot Ness sank his teeth into the guy like a pit-bull, but he couldn’t build a reliable case against Capone for his bootlegging operations or his numerous violent crimes, because he couldn’t get anyone to testify. But when Ness got hold of Capone’s cooked books, he built a case for tax evasion. Capone was ultimately sentenced to 11 years in prison.

    Sammy “the Bull” Gravano admitted 19 murders when he turned cooperator and testified against John Gotti and the Gambino crime syndicate. In exchange for his testimony, he pled guilty to a racketeering charge and served five years. But he was caught slinging ecstacy in 2000 and now he’s serving another 19 year sentence.

    Similarly, there have been numerous articles in the Times recently about the intimidation of witnesses to crimes in poor, minority, gang-ridden neighborhoods in cities like Trenton and Newark. In cases involving shootings of innocent bystanders, including children, there have been no arrests because people are too frightened to speak to police. I saw a recent article about how prosecutors in New Jersey are trying to figure out how to build murder cases with no witnesses, which is not easy.

    Drug cases are much easier. If drugs are discovered in the course of a legal stop-and-frisk, or a legal search of a vehicle or domicile, then that’s pretty much the case. And if a hardened gang leader, who has escaped conviction for violent crimes by intimidating or killing witnesses, is caught red-handed with illegal drugs, then the availability of a harsh sentence for that crime is a very good thing, in my opinion.

    The availability of significant drug sentences also provides leverage to turn defendants into cooperating witnesses, which is key in efforts to break up criminal conspiracies like street gangs and mafia organizations.

    There was never a good argument for disparate sentences for crack and powder cocaine, but please keep in mind that not all the people in jail for “nonviolent drug offenses” are nonviolent people.

20. Duke guys were set up

    You have a point, the illuminati are notorious for their hatred of Lacrosse Rapists. Do I need to point out that the Lacrosse rape case got thrown out because Nifong is a moron who didn’t even know that it don’t count as rape, apparently, if you sexually assault someone with something other than a penis. Not because anyone found the Lacrosse players actually “not guilty”, which again, isn’t actually quite hte same thing as “innocent” either.

    I think the attempted murder charge

    Attempted murder with a deadly weapon – the deadly weapon being the shoes Mychal was wearing.

    Tennis shoes count as a deadly weapon.

    Shotguns…not so much.

    It really strains credulity that he was out minding his own business, with his shotgun.

    Yeah, I love that in jena a kid with a sawn-off shotgun walking into a quickimart is just accepted by the authorities as everyday and above board. nothing off there or anything.

    My theory is that the Jena constabulary are run by a bunch of confused Boxer Rebellion reconstructionists who really believe that the power of the glow can over come mere bullets.

    Sho’nuff, the shogun of Harlem, better watch out because I hear Reed’s got him on his to do list.

    it looks like the Jena 6 did, in fact, beat and stomp this kid. I’m looking at the wikipedia entry for my chronology.

    Actualy the plea by a few of the 6 is that they only got involved after the fight had started, and to stop the fight. All are not equally guilty in the actual charge, but by the way the Jena legal system seems really intent on hanging it’s ugly little judicial noose and putting all 6 of htese boys in it that they’ll likely all go down to just the same degree, and recieve about equal amounts of prison rapage as well, no matter how many fucked up bullshit charges they have to throw at the various kids to achieve that end.

    Of course I’m still not sure how a schoolyard fight works out as a full blown charge of assault that requires they be tried as adults in the first place. Assault with intent to swirly wasn’t a fucking prosecutable crime in my highschool days.

21. The Duke Lacrosse players really had to buy the advocates to get their story across

    Because they were racist fucktards. and that’s IF they didn’t actually rape anyone. They made jokes about buying a woman and flaying her alive for god’s sake, and were witnessed flinging “nigger” at the stripper herself on the night, a lot. You’re comparing apples and orange men there.

    And it ain’t exactly been easy to get coverage for the Jena case, it was going on for like a couple of months before grassroots activists could even get the MSM to pay their “fair and balanced” attention to it, and that’s back when we had deadly tennis shoe weapons in the mix and everything. and in case you haven’t noticed, it dropped complete off the radar for quite a while.

22. Don’t believe everything you read on Wikipedia.

    This article suggests it was three-on-one:

    Questioning The Context Of The Story: Was This Really Six On One?

    Drug addiction is a public health issue not a criminal issue. Non-violent criminals including marijuana users are a waste of tax dollars and prison space. You can send a person to Harvard for a year for the amount it costs to feed and house a prisoner for a year. Addicts mainly hurt themselves and their families. Drug addiction should be treated a health problem so rehabilitation and prevention are key.

    If you’re dealing millions of dollars of drugs, that’s a different story.

23. Thanks, Emily. I fixed it.

24. Donna, we’re talking about federal sentencing here. Federal drug crimes have an element of “interstate commerce,” which is the necessary because of the Constitutional power Congress is invoking to put the crime under federal rather than state authority.

    That means that the people who get prosecuted for drug crimes in federal court will generally be distributors, or, at least, in possession of such a substantial quantity of drugs that there can be a legal presumption that there was an intent to distribute them in interstate commerce.

    The federal sentences for drug crimes tend to be much more severe than the state drug crimes, because the federal mechanism for breaking up drug rings and street gangs and mafia families is by using the likelihood of harsh sentences to persuade defendants to cooperate in exchange for leniency.

    So if a street dealer is dragged into federal court and charged with a crime with a mandatory minimum sentence of 20 years, what the investigators really want is for him to testify against all his suppliers, who the investigators will then attempt to flip, until they work their way up the chain and lock up John Gotti or whoever.

    You take away that leverage, and the guys won’t flip, because their superiors threaten violent retaliation against snitches. They need to be faced with a sufficiently long prison stretch that they are willing to cross their leaders to avoid the punishment.

    State and local authorities, by contrast, bring in a lot of people from vehicle searches, stop-and-frisks, domestic disturbance calls and the like, so there are a lot of small scale people processed through state criminal justice systems. But state laws tend to have lower penalties for drugs, and tend to provide more generous rewards for good behavior, so a year in the state pen is less time than a year in federal prison.

25. They’ve got the press coverage, though.

    Which is great and all, but it takes the social, political and economic power of the families of the Duke defendants (not to mention Duke alumni) to bring down a DA.

26. Which is great and all, but it takes the social, political and economic power of the families of the Duke defendants (not to mention Duke alumni) to bring down a DA.

    I don’t buy that. I think the media took him down and I think the state bar took him down and I think his fellow NC prosecutors and the state AG took him down because they were mortified that his kind of conduct might be associated with their offices.

    I think you’re totally overestimating the social power of the three accused students and their families. Duke University didn’t back them up at all. It went straight into damage control and cut the lax team off instead of standing behind them. It kicked out the accused students, fired the coach and suspended the team.

    David Evans, the accused student who had graduated, had his employment offer withdrawn, and the other two students did not return to Duke after the case was resolved. I have seen statements from the families suggesting that the cost of defending against the accusations put severe economic strains on them, although they may be able to recover their costs in their pending lawsuit against the City.

    I don’t know what your basis is for presuming that the families of three out-of-state Duke students have enough social, political, and economic power to make the North Carolina Attorney General condemn Nifong, or to make the North Carolina State Bar Association move to have him disbarred.

    What the Duke students were able to buy was a platform from which to present their case to what was essentially a trial by media. The Jena 6 are getting their side aired for free by Al Sharpton and the BET Music Awards and John Mellencamp and a whole lot of blogs (the Duke students did have support from some people in the blogosphere).

    I think the only way in which the Jena 6 are worse off than the Duke students is that the Duke students were innocent and the Jena 6 appear to be guilty.

27. I think the only way in which the Jena 6 are worse off than the Duke students is that the Duke students were innocent and the Jena 6 appear to be guilty.

    Crawford, how long did each of the Duke guys spend in jail because their families couldn’t raise bail?

28. No, Crawford, all a user has to do is cross state lines and it’s a federal case.

    And study up on institutionalized racism and classism.

    That’s all I have to say to you here.

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