The black teen at the center of a furor over legal racism remained behind bars - though charges against him were thrown out Friday - because the judge and prosecutor didn't come to a bail hearing yesterday, his lawyer said.
"We showed up. There was nobody there," said Bob Noel, lawyer for 17-year-old Mychal Bell of Jena, La. "No DA, no judge."
A woman who answered the phone at District Attorney Reed Walters' office said he had no bail procedure on his calendar.
A massive protest is planned for Thursday in tiny, rural Jena on behalf of Bell and five co-defendants who are known as the Jena 6. Other rallies that day include one outside Brooklyn Borough Hall.
"To imagine that in 2006, 2007, we're still fighting these fights is just incomprehensible," said Assemblyman Darryl Towns (D-Brooklyn) at a Jena 6 rally at City Hall yesterday.
An appeals court on Friday threw out the conviction of Bell, who was charged as an adult with attempted murder last year for punching a white classmate in a schoolyard scuffle.
The charges were later reduced to aggravated battery, a charge the appeals court said should have been dealt with in juvenile court.
Noel had filed a motion to have Bell released - or his $90,000 bail reduced - while the prosecutor mulls whether to appeal the overturning of Bell's conviction. He has two weeks to decide.
The Rev. Jesse Jackson said Washington should step in.
"We needed federal intervention to get into school in Little Rock [in the 1950s] and we need federal intervention now," he said.
All six black Jena football players were hit with heavy charges after a white student was punched and kicked at Jena High School on Dec. 4, one of a series of racial dustups that began when white students hung nooses in a school tree.
White students involved in similar fistfights were shown leniency.
Bell is the only one who has been tried. The other blacks still face trial on charges that are widely seen as overly harsh.
Organizers say at least 10,000 demonstrators will flood the mostly white town of 3,000 people.
Councilman Albert Vann (D-Brooklyn) organized yesterday's New York rally to keep the pressure on Louisiana prosecutors and set the stage for Thursday.
"There's a national spotlight now on Jena," he said.
via Black Amazon
8 comments:
why in the name of all that is holy is he even being held if his conviction was overturned? why would he need a bail hearing - he should have just been released.
why in the name of all that is holy is he even being held if his conviction was overturned? why would he need a bail hearing - he should have just been released.
His shoes were reclassified as a motorised vehicle and he's now up on charges of using them in a pedestrianized area.
Because they didn't toss the charges, exactly. They vacated the conviction, because he should have been tried as a juvenile but he was tried as an adult. So, the DA has the option of holding him on bail pending the juvie trial. He's also planning to appeal the overturn to the La. Supreme Court. He's got 2 weeks to do that. If he doesn't file an appeal in two weeks, then Bell goes free even if he can't make bail.
All of which is crazy, because he's already been in jail 9 months. Certainly long enough for losing his temper and throwing a few punches. If he was even guilty, since only one person placed him at the scene. The victim could not place him at the scene and there were other people who said he showed up after the fight started. This whole thing is fucked up and the people up in Jena are all bent out of shape because all these 'outsiders' are coming in to protest, etc.
*sigh* Times like these, I want to relocate to Canada or somewhere.
In Canada, they have a saying. "You guys are all racists. We're not - our minorities really are lazy."
"*sigh* Times like these, I want to relocate to Canada or somewhere."
Zan, people like this are everywhere.
Oh, I know people are like this everywhere. It's just very disheartening to have this happening so very close to home. Not surprising, but still. And what kills me are the people who live in this area who just don't get it. They really do think that nothing wrong has happened to these boys. *sigh* And I don't understand why people can't put themselves in someone else's shoes -- how hard is it to remember when you were 16 or 17 and someone made you mad? Didn't you do something stupid sometimes? Didn't you ever get into stupid, idiotic fights? Do you think YOU should have had the rest of your life taken from you because you did something unwise? Or are you somehow different because...well, just because? It makes me just want to smack people around. How would they like it if their son or daughter was in this situation? Wouldn't THEY do anything they could to help them? I mean, these boys could go to jail for, effectively, the rest of their adult lives. They'd be in jail longer than they've been alive because...why? They may have beaten up another boy. Which was stupid, even if provoked, but certainly not deserving of losing their freedom until they're 45 or 50. Come on. How can people NOT see that?
I am 45 and I think if someone hung nooses from a tree I had been sitting under, I'd be in a fight over it...even with out the historical context here.
TO me those nooses were nothing more than a threat. sigh.
Of course they were a threat. The only thing a noose is used for is murder. So, even if the kids who put it there didn't think through the racial implications (and please -- they used a noose in the South!), they still made a death threat. They knew it would freak people out, which was the point. I'm even willing to believe they didn't think it would end up this big a deal. Which is a fault of our history education, frankly, because if they really understood what the noose symbolizes, they'd have understood what reaction it was going to set off.
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