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Old Patriot's Pen

Personal pontifications of an old geezer born 200 years too late.

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I've been everywhere That was the title of a hit country-and-western song from the late 1950's, originally sung by Hank Snow, and made famous by Johnny Cash. I resemble that! My 26-year career in the Air Force took me to more than sixty nations on five continents - sometimes only for a few minutes, other times for as long as four years at a time. In all that travel, I also managed to find the perfect partner, help rear three children, earn more than 200 hours of college credit, write more than 3000 reports, papers, documents, pamphlets, and even a handful of novels, take about 10,000 photographs, and met a huge crowd of interesting people. I use this weblog and my personal website here to document my life, and discuss my views on subjects I find interesting.

Friday, October 26, 2007

The Verdict is In on the Jena 6 case

Apparently, the case of the Jena 6 is another in a long line of journalistic malpractices by "major media", as attested to by this detailed analysis by someone who both lives there and has enough common sense to look at ALL the evidence.

I grew up in the little town of Tioga, about 30 miles from Jena. I played sports against the Jena high school teams, and had friends and relatives throughout that part of Louisiana. As a young boy growing up in the 1950's and early 60's, there wasn't a better place in the world to explore and learn.

Most people think of Louisiana as being full of crazy Cajuns that live on bayous and go barefoot year round. Actually, the area is far more diverse than that. The area north of the Red River is home to many different cultures. The town of Jena itself is named after the German city of the same name. There's another town, Kolin, about 30 miles from Jena, that was settled by Bohemians. There are areas settled by descendants of Polish, Hungarian, Lithuanian, and French (not Cajun) settlers, as well as Native Americans and others. There are large numbers of blacks throughout the areas, although there are only a few areas where they're in the majority. There was a lot of "diversity" in the population long before the 1964 Civil Rights act was passed.

The media's categorization of the area, and the event, devoid of any of this background information, is a disservice to the people of Jena, the state of Louisiana, and all civic-minded Americans. It's also another in a long line of self-perpetuated "truths" that show the American major media as being more interested in creating a story than in reporting one.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

For one moment, let us allow ourselves the luxury of looking at the Jena 6 situation using the type of logic train that their supporters use.

Mychal Bell was adjudicated for a battery charge and placed on probation. Normal if this was his first offense.

Bell was later adjudicated for a property destruction charge. DA Reed Walters agreed with extending his current probation with another. Everyone deserves a second chance, right?

Then Bell was adjudicated with a second battery charge, his third felony. Well, ok, he’s a star on our high school football team. We’ll give him a third chance and extend his probation once again.

Whoops, a second destruction of property charge and his fourth felony adjudication? Perhaps if we give him another probation, he will graduate high school, move on to play college ball, and get out of our hair. “Mychal, fly right and you can escape this one-horse town.”

A third assault charge? “Mychal, if we charge you with a fifth juvenile felony, we have to send you to jail. So, here’s the deal. We’re going to charge you as an adult. Cop the plea and we will put you in the first-offender adult program like we did for Justin Sloan, and get you probation again so you can go play college ball. Then when your probation is over, we will clear your record and none of this ever happened.”

Are these the actions of racist, sentence-hungry judges and prosecutors? Or, a compassionate system that seeks, rather than imprisonment, some other judicial means? The latter, obviously. (Remember, we are using the same train of logic now as Bell’s supporters.)

How about another example?

Let’s see, two battery adjudications and now a third assault-charge. Hmm, looks like this young man follows trends.

Next, two destruction of property adjudications and now we have a burned school. Following the logic of Bell’s supporters concerning established trends, obviously Bell was the arsonist responsible.

So, there we have it. In the very scenario painted by the Jena 6 supporters and using their logic, we have here a prosecutor and a judge whose lack of getting tough on crime (damned liberals anyway) released a serial criminal to assault yet another person and burn down the school.

Let's lay the fabrications and distortions to rest and let the truth determine justice rather than emotion.

4:19 PM  
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5:57 AM  

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