Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Free The Jena 6!

I had a couple of posts partly-composed on this, but I can't add anything of value to what's already been said, and said better, by others elsewhere. Instead in the spirit of blog carnivals I give you this small collection of links.

You might think that you know what it's like being the wrong color, especially here in the South, but chances are, you don't really. Even after reading Lower Manhattanite's very compelling first-person account "Do you understand where you are?" you still won't really know, but you should read it anyway, because it's as close as you'll get to actually being there.

Friends of Justice has been following this more than most of the rest of us have, and has several good posts, including Why the "liberal" media doesn't get Jena.

I've left a few intemperate remarks around the blogosphere, but the comment I left at Facing South's Why the progressive blogosphere silence about the Jena 6? is probably the only halfway coherent one. Cool, now it looks like the National Lawyers Guild agrees with me [and goes one better].


Off topic, but since I found the Friends of Justice blog there, you should go vote in the new poll at Grits for Breakfast [only 3 more days to vote] According to the GAO, 14.6 million Americans smoked marijuana last month. Should all these people be arrested?

7 comments:

Steve Bates said...

The "war on drugs" is like that other war on a noun: unwinnable and a total waste of society's resources. I've never smoked a single J... hey, I can't stand to smoke anything... and I still say, "legalize it."

Even if you believe drug use is Deeply Wrong™, criminalizing it is the surest way not to decrease it. Legalize it. Regulate it. Compel those who abuse it to seek treatment if necessary. But don't fill scarce prison space with those whose crime is for the most part victimless.

Can you believe it? Prosecutors never want me on a jury for drug-related crimes! The nerve of them!

Steve Bates said...

As to the Jena 6... despite my late father's perception of progress in racial justice in America in his lifetime (1920-1995), we're nowhere nearly there yet. I don't approve of violent solutions, but let's face it, if the races had been switched, the prosecutor in Jena would never have charged the kids involved in what was in essence a fistfight with attempted murder. Institutionalized racism is alive and well in the 21st century.

(I have much more to say about this, but not in a comment thread.)

hipparchia said...

institutionalized racism is alive and well, and so is personalized racism, as evidenced by nooses and such.

we've made huge strides on race and racism, but they're tiny in comparison to how much further we need to go.

i was actually going to post on the war on drugs last night, but got distracted. tonight's output is the result of last nights distractions, mostly.

Unknown said...

I concur, which is about the most I can say at 5:30 a.m., having not yet gone to bed.

Anonymous said...

Prosecuter, Reed Walters says:

I cannot overemphasize how abhorrent and stupid I find the placing of the nooses on the schoolyard tree in late August 2006. If those who committed that act considered it a prank, their sense of humor is seriously distorted. It was mean-spirited and deserves the condemnation of all decent people.

But it broke no law. I searched the Louisiana criminal code for a crime that I could prosecute. There is none.


Excuse me? "distorted sense of humor?"..."mean-spirited?" It was a death threat.

hipparchia said...

nick! what? you mean i haven't blogged you to sleep already? i'd send you some lovely drugs for that if i had any left, but i don't.

hipparchia said...

cat-o-many-nics [loved the other one!], i thought i'd said all i was going to on this, for now, but now i'm all steamed up. again. grrrrrr.