By now, many of you have heard that the first of the Jena 6 defendants to be tried has his conviction overturned.
Mychal Bell, 17, should not have been tried as an adult, the state 3rd Circuit Court of Appeal said in tossing his conviction on aggravated battery, for which he was to have been sentenced Thursday.
From that same article, it appears that the rally will still be held:
Civil rights leaders, including the Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, had been planning a rally in support of the teens for the day Bell was to have been sentenced.
“Although there will not be a court hearing, we still intend to have a major rally for the Jena Six and now hopefully Mychal Bell will join us,” Sharpton said in an e-mailed statement.
Said Jackson: “The pressure must continue until all six boys are set free and sent to school, not to jail.”
If you were planning to attend the rally with the locals, please make sure that you contact them.
h/t Howling Latina
Technorati Tags: Jena 6
VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local 
“Jaquan”, you are the true definition of the the ” N” word. Ignorance abounds in all your stereotypical comments. I wonder if you would have the courage to verbalize these statements face to face. It must be nice to have a outlet where you can truly display all your racist views and still remain undercover? Its the internet version of the KKK, and we wonder why the situation in Jena 6 is happening. Obviously, Law enforcement in Jena are staffed with mostly “Jaquans”
I could say alot more, but you are not worth anymore of my time. My prayers and thoughts go out to the Jena 6 and their families and to anyone else in this world facing this type of injustice, irregardless to their skin color/sexual orientation/religion/sex etc..
I cannot believe that people who are not from Louisiana think they have a clue about what’s going on here…you’ve all been mislead. I read these posts you make, but they’re all wrong. I know your intentions are honorable, but like always you only know what the media has told you… under the leadership of J. Jackson and Al Sharpton…they are NOT your friends or allies! Don’t believe everything you see on T.V. or the internet…you’ve been duped! Don’t listen to ANYONE who teaches hate…do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Get the facts. When 6 people kick someone repeatedly after they are unconscious…it doesn’t matter what their races are…it’s wrong. No one has mentioned that it was a young black man that pulled the white boy free of the beating. Look for the pix on the internet of what the young man looked like after he was beaten…what if he were your son? Bell had 3 prior convictions and has even had another SINCE the beating incident…and you want to HELP them? Help him by letting him go to jail and learn some responsibility. Help his black neighbors who are constantly mistreated by the Jena 6 and their gang. Your money has paid for all of Bell’s family to get new cars…his mother has gotten a new Jag. She has previously been carted around by the police to pay her bills, while her husband hasn’t even been around. If you want to come down here, come down here to get the facts straight for yourself, and then make a rational decision. As long as people come by the thousands to support people who have committed criminal acts simply because of their race, they won’t be taken seriously by others. I love people of all kinds, and I hate to see the lies that have been perpetrated splitting people apart for no good reason…find out for yourselves.
Lets see…a noose…yeah that’s really a big, scary deal.. Why I bet it would even attack and kill all by itself. Oh, my….what a dangerous, evil piece of rope.
And six guys beating up one guy…now that was harmless. They were just playing around…after all..Six on one…such manly odds.
Besides…………..
We all know that rope hanging on a tree was the biggest, most evil of the two instances.
Hanging a few pieces of rope from a tree … Much worse than beating someone senseless.
And Sharpton and Jackson….funny they show up so close to election times. But they just want to help….lol..RIGHT!
All makes perfect sense to me…NOT!
To Jena 1:
you are right, we do not live in Jena and do not know all that is going on and unfortunately anytime you have a major situation like this that results if fund raising etc.. the money does not always go for the right things and people don’t always act accordingly. I am not a supporter of Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson, they do not represent me in any form or fashion. I have seen the pictures of the boy they beat up, I can tell you, He was not beaten within a inch of his life. I am an RN who has worked in the ICU’s in an urban environment for many years, i have seen beating victims many times over. When someone is punched, etc the redness and bruising that follow looks very bad, alto of times worse than the actual injury,. My mother fell last summer and landed on the hard concrete. She injured her arm and side of her face,a few hrs later she looked like she lost a fight with Ali in his heyday. We thought her nose was broken, bc the swelling was so bad, it was not. Anyone who can attend a function the same day of a so called brutal attack, that would be a miracle. No one has said not to punish these boys, but the punishment must fit the crime. 22yrs in jail for a school yard fight… Ridiculous. Infortunately for Mychal Bell, Jena Law enforcement are using his past indescretions against him.
@33: George Allen, is that you?
From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution 9/23/07
It corrects a lot of incorrect facts you have all written about.
Please read and apologize to each other.
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http://www.ajc.com/search/content/news/stories/2007/09/23/jena0923.html
============================
Locals see Jena not as world does now
Good, bad elements in all colors: Attack’s tale may not be one of pure racial hatred. Black and white residents hope town not forever tarnished.
By Todd Lewan
Associated Press
Published on: 09/23/07
Jena, La. —- It’s got all the elements of a Delta blues ballad from the days of Jim Crow: hangman’s nooses dangling from a shade tree; a mysterious fire in the night; swift deliberations by an all-white jury.
And drawn by this story, which evokes the worst of a nightmarish past, they came by the thousands this past week to Jena —- to demand justice, to show strength, to beat back the forces of racism as did their parents and grandparents.
But there are many in Jena who say the tale of the “Jena Six” —- the black teenagers who were charged with attempted murder and conspiracy for attacking a white classmate at Jena High School last December —- is not that simple .
Black and white, they say that in its repeated retelling, the story has taken on a life of its own. It has transformed a schoolyard stomping into a cause celebre, and those accused in it into what a major Southern daily described as “latter-day Scottsboro Boys.”
And they say that while their town’s race relations are not unblemished, Jena isn’t the cauldron of bigotry as depicted.
To Ben Reid, 61, who has lived in Jena since 1957 and lived here throughout the civil rights era, “this whole thing ain’t no downright, racial affair.”
“You have good people here and bad people here, on both sides,” said Reid. “This thing has been blown out of proportion. What we ought to do is sit down and talk this thing out, ’cause once all is said and done and you media folks leave, we’re the ones who’re going to have to live here.”
But what happened, exactly?
The story goes that a year ago, a black student asked at an assembly whether he could sit in the shade of a live oak, which, the story goes, was labeled “the white tree” because only white students hung out there. The next day, three nooses dangled from the oak —- code for “KKK” —- the handiwork of three white students, who were suspended for just three days.
Much of that is disputed. What happened next is not: Two months later, an arsonist torched a wing of Jena High School. (The case remains unsolved.) Two fights between blacks and whites roiled the town that weekend, culminating in a schoolyard brawl Dec. 4 that led the district attorney to charge the Jena Six with attempted murder. The lethal weapon he cited to justify the charge: the boys’ sneakers.
In July, the first to be tried, Mychal Bell, was convicted after two hours of deliberation by an all-white jury on reduced charges of aggravated battery and conspiracy to commit it.
(It was widely reported that Bell, now 17, was an honor student with no prior criminal record. Although he had a high grade-point average, he was, in fact, on probation for at least two counts of battery and a count of criminal damage to property. His conviction was overturned because an appeals court ruled he should not have been tried as an adult.)
There is, however, a more nuanced rendition of events —- one that can be found in court testimony, in interviews with teachers, officials and students at Jena High, and in public statements from a U.S. attorney who reviewed the case for possible federal intervention.
Consider:
> The so-called “white tree” at Jena High, often reported to be the domain of only white students, was nothing of the sort, according to teachers and school administrators; students of all races, they say, congregated under it.
> Two nooses —- not three —- were found dangling from the tree. Beyond being offensive to blacks, the nooses were cut down because black and white students “were playing with them, pulling on them, jump-swinging from them, and putting their heads through them,” according to a black teacher who witnessed the scene.
> There was no connection between the September noose incident and December attack, according to Donald Washington, an attorney for the U.S. Justice Department in western Louisiana who investigated claims that these events might be race-related hate crimes.
> The three youths accused of hanging the nooses weren’ t suspended for just three days —- they were isolated at an alternative school for about a month, and then given an in-school, two-week suspension.
> The six-member jury that convicted Bell was, indeed, all white. However, only one in 10 people in LaSalle Parish is African-American, and though black residents were selected randomly by computer and summoned for jury selection, none showed up.
Jena (pronounced JEE-nuh) is about 225 miles and a world apart from racially mixed New Orleans. In a place where per capita income is $13,761, there aren’t any swank, French restaurants, but rather, family eateries such as the Burger Barn, Ginny’s and Maw & Paw’s.
Not all vestiges of the past are beloved, or quaint.
There are no black lawyers, no black doctors and one black employee in the town’s half-dozen banks. (The employee is male, an accountant who works out of public view.)
With the closure of the sawmills in the ’50s, the town now relies heavily on the exploitation of oil and natural gas, offshore.
There are relatively few good-paying jobs, and some point out that African-Americans with higher educations tend to leave the parish.
Cleveland Riser, 75, who began working in Jena as a teacher and then rose to become an assistant superintendent of schools in LaSalle Parish, says blacks have long had trouble getting ahead in Jena.
“In my experience, the opportunity for advancing in my profession was denied, in my opinion, because I was black —- not because I was unprepared professionally, or because of my performance.”
Here and across the “crossroads” of Louisiana, there are Klan supporters, to be sure; David Duke, the former KKK Grand Wizard, carried LaSalle Parish in his 1991 run for state governor.
But “if I could take you back to 60 years ago, and then fast forward to today, you’d have to say we’ve come a long way,” says Billy Wayne Fowler, a white school-board member.
Most townsfolk, he says, interpreted the events of last year pretty much the same way —- that a small minority of troublemakers, both black and white, got out of hand, and that the responses from authorities weren’t always on the mark.
The boys who hung the nooses “probably should have been expelled,” Fowler says, and the attempted murder charges brought against the black teenagers were “too harsh, too severe.”
Still, “they knocked that boy out cold and were stomping on him,” says Johnny Wilkinson, 44, a platform officer on an oil rig. “They might have killed him. I believe punishment would have been measured the same way if it had been the opposite way around and six whites had attacked a black kid.”
(The teenager who was beaten, Justin Barker, 17, was knocked out but walked out of a hospital after two hours of treatment for a concussion and an eye that was swollen shut. He attended a school ring ceremony later that night.)
“They haven’t always been fair in the courthouse with us,” says Braxter Hatcher, 62, a janitor at Jena High for 18 years, who is black. “If you’re black, they go overboard sometimes. I think this was just a fight between boys. I don’t think it was attempted murder.”
Reed Walters, the LaSalle Parish district attorney prosecuting the cases of the Jena Six, insisted the case “is not and never has been about race. It is about finding justice for an innocent victim and holding people accountable for their actions.”
Huey Crockett, 50, lives with his wife, Carla, 45, just beyond Jena’s limits. The Crocketts, who are black, have complained to police that Bell and other youngsters were causing trouble in their neighborhood —- scratching cars with keys, breaking the windows of parked cars, spraying property with paint.
The authorities, Crockett says, were always slow to respond.
“But as soon as he had a run-in with a white boy, they came down on him like a hammer. That’s not right.”
On a road into town, a brick portal welcomes visitors to Jena, touting it as “A Nice Place to Call Home.” But when the national spotlight goes away, will it be that nice place?
On Wednesday, as thousands of demonstrators prepared to pour into Jena, religious leaders held a unified church service, attended by blacks and whites.
“We prayed for one another, prayed for all of the boys involved in this,” says Eddie Thompson, a white pastor at the Sanctuary Family Worship Center. “We’re not used to the glare, but something positive is going on here. I believe that we’re maybe listening to our neighbors better, when we didn’t listen before.”
ELIZABETH LANDT / Staff Map locates Jena. Inset map outlines area of detail in Louisiana relative to the Southeastern U.S. and Atlanta.
TO JENA 1 — Please explain this to me since Bell has been in jail since the attack:
Your statement: [QUOTE][i]Originally posted by franker01 [/i]
[B]
First, there is more Black on White crime than the other way around. No, I’m not going to spoon feed you a link (should you happen to ask). Google it.
TO JENA 1 — SORRY looks like I had something in my clipboard.
Your statement was: Bell had 3 convictions and one SINCE the beating. How is that possible if he was in jail?
the jena 6 should do life for what they did end of story!the govenor of that state should kick sharpton and his goonsquad out of that state!