In a time of chimpanzees, I was a penguin.
The religious right is motivated by the suspicion that someone, somewhere,
is having fun -- and that this must be stopped.
Kill a young black boy... not so much. And the all white jury agreed. And anybody who disagrees, well... they just ought to keep their mouths shut. Otherwise they might find this on their doorway:
-- Badtux the "Racism is dead in America!" Penguin
Ground rules: Comments that consist solely of insults, fact-free talking points, are off-topic, or simply spam the same argument over and over will be deleted. The penguin is the only one allowed to be an ass here. All viewpoints, however, are welcomed, even if I disagree vehemently with you.
WARNING: You are entitled to create your own arguments, but you are NOT entitled to create your own facts. If you spew scientific denialism, or insist that the sky is purple, or otherwise insist that your made-up universe of pink unicorns and cotton candy trees is "real", well -- expect the banhammer.
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That is total crap. The sickle cell had nothing to do with it.
ReplyDeleteBay County/Panama City is corrupt and everyone knows it. The medical examiner is incompetent, the initial investigation for the state was conducted by a former sheriff of the county, who was forced to resign. The entire program was eliminated, but they found these people not guilty.
This isn't the first time this sort of thing has happened. The right to greater representation by free attorneys was the result of a case from Bay County that went to the Supreme Court.
And let's not forget the reason that the jury was all-white, which is that Florida has systematically disenfranchised black people by disproportionately targeting blacks for drug crime enforcement then stripping their citizenship rights from them. This is no different from the old "Black Codes" of post-Civil-War days, which found blacks guilty of "vagrancy" and disenfranchised them, except it has a veneer of respectability over it because supposedly the law applies to everybody. Yeah right. Everybody knows there's two laws in this country -- one for black people, and one for white people. One of my co-workers from India knows it quite well. Her husband is rather dark-skinned for an Indian. They are *always* being pulled over for "Driving While Black", because the cops think their car is too expensive for black people to be driving (they are both very well paid computer software engineers with a combined income of around a quarter million dollars a year, so you can imagine they aren't driving Yugos!).
ReplyDeleteBadtux, the only people who drive Yugos in SoCal are so wealthy they don't care, everyone else leases Bimmers.
ReplyDeleteAt $15/per day jury fee, most people can't afford to lose a week of work to sit on a jury so you get civil service and retirees who are overwhelmingly white.
iichá yaa hizdah
ReplyDeletechich'ii bitsen yénaldi'ih
(the axe forgets
the tree remembers)
taza
"Racism is dead in America!"
ReplyDeleteIt is? Damn, someone forgot to tell me. Although, I will admit that many black folks give the rest of them a bad name.