Ma'at was the Egyptian Goddess of Truth, Justice and Order. Her headdress ostrich feather served as the ultimate arbiter of the goodness of a man's life, and was balanced against a newly deceased person's heart on the scales of justice as a precondition of being permitted to pass into the Afterlife. Those whose hearts were heavy with wicked deeds had their souls devoured immediately by the demigod Ammin. Only those whose were lighter than Ma'at's feather were permitted to pass through into immortality with the Gods.
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The NYPD officers who riddled Sean Bell with 50 bullets on the eve of his wedding have been acquitted of all charges following a bench trial. A bench trial in which the judge said, pretty much point blank in comments that were uncalled for and evince a certain mindset in a so-called objective judicial officer, that the prosecution witnesses were simply "not believable."
The most surprising part is how utterly unsurprising the verdict was. And how utterly unsurprising the majority of reactions at NYTimes.com reader's comment page have been, so far - aka Sean Bell got what was coming to him. They mirror the mindset of the judge, truthfully.
Since we all know that Black folks don't get murdered by the police, no matter what color hte police are. Never. No matter what.
I know differently, having now lived a long time. Black men's lives in America continue to be worth not the spit that the cops drop when they blow them away. I wish that we'd just own up to it, frankly - because I grow weary of pretending that there will ever be an unjustified killing of a black person by police in the US where someone actually goes to jail.
And yet folks still appear clueless about why so many of us are so damned angry, all the time.
After reading about the following case, I know that it is going to elicit emotional responses from many different quarters with many different agendas. While I support the right of all citizens to protect their homes and their lives what occurred in this case does appear to support that doctrine. There were numerous forces at work that day in this neighborhood that all came to a head in the fatal shooting of two men. The case revolves around Joe Horn, a 61 year old retiree who happened to witness the burglary of a neighbor's house. Mr. Horn did the neighborly thing and contacted 911 to report the crime in progress. So far so good, neighborhood watch is working. However, it is at this point where the story takes a tragic and bizarre twist.
The newest survival tip to young non-white male persons who encounter law enforcement (since even in these circumstances, they're disproportionately male and disproportionately Black or Latino) is to avoid carrying your hairbrush with you, especially if you are not 100% sane.
This appears to be the early lesson we're learning from the death of yet another non-white teenager, 18-year old Khiel Coppin, last night in my old neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, New York. The early reports are that New York's finest believed he had a gatt when in fact he was carrying a Goody.
The news of young Mr. Coppin's death is still pretty hot off the presses less than 24 hours after the event. So, of course, as is always the case when a completely unarmed person gets shot and killed by the police, the stories about what happened are still all over the map. You have those witnesses who claim that that Mr. Coppin asserted that he had a gun, or that his mother said to police he had a gun, in person or on the phone -- take your pick. You have witnesses who say it was clear this teenager was unarmed, that the police knew it because he put up his hands, and even that one of the officers even confronted his colleague about why he shot Mr. Coppin. Right now there's not even agreement about whether he was killed by 13 shots or all 20 hit him (not that this detail really means all that much, except to reinforce that the NYPD still hasn't figured out despite Amadou Diallo and Sean Bell that Black men don't need to have multiple weapons emptied into them just to kill them; they die just as quick as white men do with one or two well-placed shots -- which to me begs the question of why multiple cops are wedded to the habit of emptying their weapons routinely when Black suspects are involved, rather than shoot to disable.)
I was reading an interesting article on AlterNet discussing the ramifications of DNA and race. You would think that in 2007, we would have gotten past the point where "scientists" would still be trying to use science to devalue people by race. But I guess the more things change, the more they stay the same. Prejudice and racial intolerance seems to be ingrained in many people's psyche and no amount of scientific study or facts will change their beliefs. It is a shame that millenniums together have done nothing to increase the amount of knowledge concerning race and humanity. Ignorance is still the order of the day even among so-called "men of science".
The sentences for crack cocaine are some of the harshest in our criminal justice system. Crack cocaine is the crystallized, highly-addictive form of cocaine used primarily by blacks and other poor people. The disparity between the sentences given out to crack users and low-level dealers and the same given to powder cocaine users is 100 to 1. Which means a powder cocaine user would have to possess 100 times the amount of powder as a crack user to receive the same amount of jail time. Now both users would possess the same drug, just in different forms. It would be like me getting 20 years for having ice cubes and you getting 5 years for having water, we both would have the same thing. So why is there a discrepancy in sentencing?
I knew that the Anita Hill I remembered would NOT take Uncle Clarence Thomas' making the rounds on TV and making money (he hopes) off his vindictive screed lying down. And, sure enough, she hasn't - because this morning in the NY Times she has reminded everyone of the truth - with the same poise and grace she showed 16 years ago as she was being smeared in the Thomas confirmation process. And she's made clear that whatever Thomas hopes to accomplish from this, telling his one-sided, factually inaccurate story now free from challenge won't be one of those things:
ON Oct. 11, 1991, I testified about my experience as an employee of Clarence Thomas's at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
I stand by my testimony.
Justice Thomas has every right to present himself as he wishes in his new memoir, "My Grandfather's Son." He may even be entitled to feel abused by the confirmation process that led to his appointment to the Supreme Court.
But I will not stand by silently and allow him, in his anger, to reinvent me.
There's got to be some sort of "lose your ever-loving mind" drug in the water being drunk by law enforcement officers working with Black kids this past year.
I say that because I woke up Saturday morning after a very trying business trip, finally at home again but looking at a weekend full of work, to read on CNN that there are some ignoramuses in Greenville, Ohio, who think that a 10 year old Black child named Timothy Byers is capable of the mental state necessary to murder his entire family. They have reached that conclusion, and charged the 10 year little boy old with murder, solely because he set a fire that caused his house to burn down. And, since he confessed to deliberately setting a fire (a confession made outside the presence of his guardians -- his grandparents due to the death of his mother in the fire) he's a murderer.
Except for one tiny detail: nobody disputes that this little boy didn't mean to hurt anyone.
You had to know that Uncle Thomas was waiting for the day when he could finally tell a version of his story of the Anita Hill fiasco where he wasn't under oath and wasn't under the scrutiny of the media watching his every move, facial tic and breath to make sure that he was telling the truth.
And, neither being under oath nor able to be compelled to be put under oath, what a tale Justice Clarence apparently tells. According to him, not only was Anita Hill a terrible lawyer and incompetent, but anyone who agreed with her was a terrible EEOC employee too. We expected that. Here's the unexpected part: according to Justice Thomas, Anita Hill's accusation that he was a porno freak and harasser was ludicrous and Uncle Thomas was "one of the least likely candidates imaginable" for the charge of sexual harassment because....wait for it.....he'd purportedly made clear a desire to run an agency staffed mainly by minorities and women.
This is the type of astute logical reasoning that has made reading Supreme Court decisions penned by Clarence Thomas especially painful for lawyers the past 15 years. If anyone can explain why insisting on a diverse work environment (assuming that this is his true feelings) means that a person can't be a stank ho getting off on porn and chasing skirts at the same time, I'll buy you a cookie.
(It will have to await another diary my discussion of what appears to be Justice Thomas trying to again "put his Black on," since this "I'm for advancement of the historically oppressed" narrative of his is now the second recent reference I'm aware of -- the first being his lengthy diatribe in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District #1 in which he partially garbs himself in his long-discarded Black Nationalist past and tries to evoke the ghost of the late Justice Thurgood Marshall as justification to eviscerate Brown v. Board of Education with a backhanded argument that, basically, Black people can't trust white people to ensure our equality, so we should stop trying to demand that the law ensure it - no, I'm not joking go read it yourself!).
With Reed Walters' quiet notification to Katleen Babineaux Blanco yesterday that, despite all his bloviating about the decision of the Louisiana appellate court ruling that Mychal Bell should not have been tried as an adult in the Jena Six case (all with his public posturing; I'll write a separate diary about Walters' self-serving editorial in yesterday's Times and his race-baiting suggesting that only divine intervention stopped a race war during the protest on September 20th when I return home from traveling!), we all knew that this day was coming.
OK I admit I did not know whether to laugh or cry when I read yesterday that Orenthal James Simpson, aka the "Black Man Who Fell From Whiteness" had been allegedly reduced to common thievery.
I don't normally talk about OJ. OJ causes people to lose their ever-loving mind. White American folks in particular are a No Go in my mind where OJ is concerned. Personally I feel the man got a fair trial and was acquitted whether white folks like it or not. Of course, like many folks I have my theories about the case and my opinions about the outcome -- but most importantly after 12 years I have put it firmly in the past, as most sane people do with something that took place over a decade ago.
Thus, since I'm not a sports fan, the Juice has happily been an irrelevancy in my life except for when I'm once in a blue moon stumbling upon his name while doing online legal research since the civil cases are precedents for a number of common issues that come up in litigation.
Maybe I was right the other day: maybe the tide really IS turning in Jena.
Or, in this case, the larger state of Louisiana. Where, less than an hour ago, the Court of Appeals overturned Mychal Bell's conviction on charges of aggravated battery on the grounds that he should not have been tried as an adult once the "adult criminal charge" (the bogus attempted murder charge) had been dismissed by the State.
I've been in active litigation mode for several days and thus have not been blogging due to lack of time, but wanted to note this morning's early news that yesterday, pending charges for two of the Jena Six -- Carwin Jones and Theo Shaw -- have been reduced from attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder to aggravated assault, a lesser included charge of the aggravated battery charge on which Mychal Bell was convicted in July. A big, big change. And an obvious one.
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
This diary is part of the Afrospear campaign (the call for which was made by Bro. D. Yobachi Boswell - hat tip to him!) to raise our voices against the travesty of justice being played out in the case of six teenagers known as the Jena Six. Why this campaign? Well, the Afrospear press release today makes it plain:
The Afrosphere Jena 6 Coalition "ask that the mainstream traditional media step forward and discharge their duty to provide coverage of this vitally important event to their viewers and readers and act as "the fourth institution" of governmental "checks and balance" that constitutional framers intended the press to be."
I regret only that this diary is coming late in the designated day, a victim of 48-hours of work-crisis I won't bore the reader with.
Governor Rick Perry of Texas has, following an extraordinarily rare recommendation from the Texas Board of Appeals, just commuted the death sentence of Kenneth Foster, whose execution was scheduled to take place today.
The power of prayer, for those of us who have been praying. Since as many bloggers far better and less busy than I have noted, Foster's death sentence was unjust, based solely on what is known as "law of the parties" (in Texas), a twisted law which basically allows Texas to send someone to death for not being a soothsayer. The "law of the parties" -- the felony murder rule we lawyers all know and love (not) on steroids -- allows a death sentence to be imposed if an accomplice to a felony "should have anticipated" that a murder would occur during its commission.
Oliver White Hill, the last of the titans who brought the original desegregation cases consolidated in the now-moribund Brown v. Board of Educationpassed this week, at the age of 100.
When he takes a swing at trying to explain why, despite the nightmare that is the ongoing Jena 6 case, the mainstream media seem to be MIA down in Jena - -- at least until today's Washington Post article, which starts off with a title that makes it sound like the tension down in Jena is about the tree they cut down (as if that was supposed to make it all better, I guess, killing the one thing that could be called completely innocent in this mess.) And knocks it out of the park.
According to Bro. Too Sense, it's because there is no Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton down there making noise about it and allowing those who can't handle it an easy dis The money quote from Too Sense's piece:
The relationship between Sharpton, Jackson, and the media is as consensual as sex on a conjugal visit. As long as Sharpton and Jackson stayed away from the Jena Six controversy, the mainstream media ignored it almost entirely.
The reason is that Sharpton and Jackson provide convenient targets for white resentment.
