A few weeks after
the nooses were discovered in September, an arsonist torched a wing of
Jena High School. Race fights roiled the town for days, culminating in
a schoolyard brawl that led the LaSalle Parish district attorney to
charge six black teenagers with attempted murder for beating up a white
teenager who suffered no life-threatening injuries.
Mychal Bell,
the first of the six to be tried, is scheduled to be sentenced in
September. He was convicted in July by an all-white jury on reduced
charges of aggravated battery and conspiracy to commit it. Like his
co-defendants -- Robert Bailey, Carwin Jones, Bryant Purvis, Theodore
Shaw and Jesse Beard -- Bell had no prior criminal record.
He
faces up to 22 years in prison, and civil rights advocates say the
reduced charges were still excessive and did not fit the crime. "Can
they really do this to me?" Bell asked recently, sitting in his jail
cell looking frightened and numb.
The white 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 ring ceremony later that night.
District
Attorney Reed Walters said in December that his decision to prosecute
the black teenagers to the full extent of the law had nothing to do
with race. He would not comment further on the case while it is
pending. But black residents in Jena said issues of race permeate their
town, 230 miles northwest of New Orleans.
Civil
rights advocates say the issues are much larger than Jena. Zealous
prosecutions of black youngsters are multiplying across the nation,
they say. They cite three highly visible cases in which white
prosecutors won prison sentences of up to 10 years against black
teenagers, only to have those sentences voided on appeal.
In Douglas County, Ga., Genarlow Wilson
was convicted of molestation and sentenced to 10 years for engaging in
consensual sex with a 15-year-old girl when he was 17. He served more
than two years before a judge voided the sentence, but Wilson, now 21,
remains in prison while the state appeals.
Also in Georgia,
the state Supreme Court threw out the conviction of Marcus Dixon, 19,
who was serving a 10-year prison sentence for having sex with an
underage white girl in 2003.
In Paris, Tex.,
a special conservator ordered the release of Shaquanda Cotton, 16, who
was serving up to seven years for shoving a white teacher's aide in
2005. Months earlier, the same white judge had given probation to a
14-year-old white girl who burned down her family's home.
"We are
seeing two systems of justice: one system of justice for white folks
and one system of justice for black folks," said Jordan Flaherty, an
editor who is following the Louisiana case for Left Turn magazine, an
liberal activist publication based in New York.
"If
this had been a fight between only black students, there would not have
been this penalty," said Flaherty, who is white. "This is not a group
of kids with a history of trouble, but they do have a history of
speaking out."
Liz Ryan, chief executive of the Washington-based
Campaign for Youth Justice, said Flaherty's observations are supported
by research. Black youths represented 28 percent of juvenile arrests
and 58 percent of youths sent to adult prisons between 2002 and 2004,
according to a study by the campaign titled "And Justice for Some:
Differential Treatment of Minority Youth in the Justice System."
"Kids
of color are much more likely to be sent to adult courts than white
kids," Ryan said. "It's the greatest disparity in the juvenile justice
system."
The parents of the victim, David and Kelli Barker, told
reporters they are tired of the attention generated by the case and
declined to comment. But in a June interview with the Daily Town Talk
newspaper in nearby Alexandria, La., David Barker said the prosecution was fair.
"All
you hear is, 'Justice for the Jena Six.' I wouldn't mind justice for
the one," he said. "It doesn't matter the race -- what matters is what
happened to our son."
Jena sits on a winding state highway, a sleepy rural outpost. Once upon a time, it was Ku Klux Klan
country. But, "in the past 50 years, our little town has come a long
way," said school board member Billy Wayne Fowler. He said white people
in the town are no longer racist, but he acknowledged that black people
were mistreated in the past.
Black residents said the tying of
the nooses was evidence that race relations have not improved that
much. They said the superintendent's decision to hand only a three-day
suspension to the white students who tied the nooses, overriding the
principal's decision to expel them, sparked the anger that led to the
disturbance.
The chain of events began at the start of school
last September. At an assembly that kicked off classes, a black
freshman asked the white principal if black students could sit under
"the white tree" -- a shade tree where only white students regularly
sat. The answer was, "You can sit anywhere you want."
But when
black students showed up in the broiling hot yard, they found three
nooses hanging from the tree's branches. After a number of scuffles,
the district attorney came to the school and gathered students for a
tough talk.
"I can make your life go away with the stroke of a
pen," they recalled him saying. Black students said he looked directly
at them. Walters denied it.
The incident was never reported to
police, said U.S. Attorney Donald W. Washington. A report might have
triggered a hate-crime investigation, although federal authorities
rarely go after juveniles for such crimes. Washington added that if the
students had been expelled, tensions might have been eased and the
violence avoided.
In the weeks that followed, the fighting
continued. In one scuffle, Robert Bailey, one of the six teenagers now
facing trial, said a white man broke a beer bottle over his head after
jumping him at a party, but there was no immediate investigation.
Months later, Justin Sloan, who is white, was charged with simple
battery and given probation for that attack.
Bailey was involved
in a second incident when he and friends spotted one of his attackers
at a gas station. As Bailey and his friends approached, they said, the
white teenager ran to his truck and brandished an unloaded shotgun at
them. Bailey helped wrest the weapon away, refused to give it back and
was charged with stealing the gun.
Days later came the school fight that led to the prosecutions. Sheriff Carl Smith said the crimes justified the charges.
"It's
gotten into the media, and the media has spread it all over the United
States that this is about race when it's not about race," he said.
Black parents strongly disagree.
"It's
always been about race in Jena. Once you're here, you learn to deal
with what happens," said Caseptla Bailey, Robert Bailey's mother. "Some
of the things that have gone on, we allowed to go on. It's just gotten
to a point that people were ready to stand up and fight."
