http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/10/AR2007081002058_pf.html
I applaud The Post for covering the tragic story of the "Jena Six." However, your story missed some critical details. Most important, the public defender appointed to represent Mychal Bell called no witnesses and did not challenge the jury selected from an all-white pool. The defense attorney's negligence is shocking, although perhaps we should not be shocked given the other facts of the story and the rampant racism at play. The article also did not mention that the victim, whose family seems to think he is being denied justice, later showed up at school with a loaded gun. Incidentally, the "unjust" system his father bemoaned held the boy on only $5,000 bail on his charge, while the students accused of knocking him down were held on bail of up to $138,000. No impartial person, considering this situation, could believe that the town of Jena, La., is not stuck in the terrible Deep South past. -- Jane Dimyan-Ehrenfeld Silver Spring If the victim did not go to the hospital before he showed up at school with a loaded gun after losing a fight he started with one not six, following three assaults on the black boys, two with loaded weapons which the black boys took away without anyone getting shot, the victim was too healthy for the charge for self-defense to be "aggravated" assault. Aggravated implies that the victim was seriously injured, but he did not leave school to go the hospital and attended a school assembly, laughing and smiling, with no visible signs of injury, later the day after he lost a fight he and his friends had been provoking with hate crimes, brandishing firearms, assault and robbery, for weeks. On one occasion, the same terrorist gang of WHITE boys was robbing a convenience store gas station with a revolver, when the black boys came in and took the gun away. When the black boys turned the gun over to police, police tried to charge them with theft! These black boys are angels and ought to be the cops in Jena, if they can twice disarm the real criminals and never seriously injure the real criminals. The librarian at the high school said in a TV interview I saw, that,"racism is not the problem, crime is the problem". She was overlooking the three firearms incidents by the white terrorist gang, and their beating and assaults, armed and unarmed, focusing only on the black boy defending himself once without causing any bodily injury, and that the other five black boys watched, as if it was right to call any of their actions "crime" amped up to charges amounting to a life sentence. -Bob Dodds http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/NewsSearch?st=sharpton+jena&x=0&y=0&fn=&sfn=&sa=&cp=&hl=false&sb=-1&sd=&ed=&blt= Sharpton criticized officials in this racially tense Louisiana town on Sunday, saying the attempted murder charges leveled against six black teens show "one rule for white kids and one for black kids." March in Jena 9/20, the day of Mychal's sentencing on exponentially exagerated charges, predicated on charging these boys with stealing a gun when they turned in a revolver they had taken away from one of the white terrorist gang in an attempted convenience store gas station robbery. "There is a Satanic darkness on the land", said Abraham Lincoln of southern hypocrisy, in the Lincoln-Douglas debates.
