Texas Racism?
Orin Kerr and Mark Kleiman rightfully express outrage at the light sentences given to a privileged few whites who beat a mentally disabled black man.
Then Kleiman drinks the Deaniac KoolAid and says the following with a wink and a nod:
(Any bets on which Presidential candidate carried the white vote in Linden last year?)Yeah, W supports assault. Clever guy that Kleiman. Way to lose the argument by using repulsive behavior to justify an I Hate W rant. Was the goal to use Billy Ray Johnson's misery for a remark only an elitist would find clever? Let me see how this game works -- Any bets on which Presidential candidate carried the IslamoFascist vote in LA last year? Howard Witt of the Chicago Tribune compares and contrasts. First, we have Clueless Penny:
"It was a very unfortunate and senseless thing," said Wilford Penny, 73, who last month completed a 6-year term as Linden's mayor. "But I don't think there was anything racial about it. These guys were drinking, and this guy [Johnson] liked to dance. I'm not surprised when they get to drinking and use the n-word. The black boy was somewhere he shouldn't have been, although they brought him out there."Do we have shades of gray?
At the heart of the case Whether Johnson was victimized because he is black or because he is mentally retarded lies at the heart of the conflicting readings of the case. Witnesses who attended the pasture party on Sept. 27, 2003, gave authorities evidence on both counts. "Everybody knew [Johnson] was mentally challenged, that he wasn't quite right," said one 23-year-old white resident of Linden who attended the party but spoke on the condition that he not be identified. "He was having a good time, drinking. Then they started making fun of him a little bit, making him dance. It was kind of to have someone to amuse them, to make a monkey out of him." At one point during the party, Richardson said trial testimony showed, Johnson was directed to stick his hand into a bonfire to remove a burning log--evidence that he was being baited because of his mental disabilities. But many other witnesses reported that Johnson was also subjected to "a lot of racial slurs," Richardson said. "It was the n-word," she said, "and there were references made concerning the Ku Klux Klan, asking [Johnson] what he would do if the KKK had come out that night." As the party wound down after midnight, evidence showed, Christopher Colt Amox, who was 20 at the time, punched Johnson in the mouth, toppling him to the ground. As Johnson lay unconscious, vomiting and gagging, Amox and three other young men--James Cory Hicks, then 24; Dallas Chadwick Stone, then 18; and John Wesley Owens, then 19--debated whether to call an ambulance, authorities said. Instead, they loaded Johnson into a pickup truck and drove him 2 miles down a little-used dirt road, tossing him next to a public dump, on top of the nest of fire ants. Several hours later, Hicks, who at the time worked as a guard at the Cass County Jail, returned to the scene and called the local sheriff to report that he had found "a man passed out on the ground." The FBI and local law-enforcement officials investigated the case, and all came to the conclusion that what happened to Johnson was a crime based on his mental incapacity, not his race. Thus no state or federal hate crimes or civil rights charges were lodged.This is why I loathe the concept of a Hate Crime. Why should the punishment be less because he is mentally disabled? Why even was the question of race, once decided not to be the motivation, a mitigating factor? We should take Hate Crimes and flush 'em.