The New York Times has an op-ed today from Reed Walters, the district attorney in the Jena 6 case, in which he defends the prosecution of the six teenagers, his decision to try Mychal Bell as an adult, and his inability to prosecute the noose-hangers because "it broke no law." Part of it is an appeal to the details of the attack that brought the charges:
The victim in this crime, who has been all but forgotten amid the focus on the defendants, was a young man named Justin Barker, who was not involved in the nooses incident three months earlier. According to all the credible evidence I am aware of, after lunch, he walked to his next class. As he passed through the gymnasium door to the outside, he was blindsided and knocked unconscious by a vicious blow to the head thrown by Mychal Bell. While lying on the ground unaware of what was happening to him, he was brutally kicked by at least six people.
All well and good; no one's disputing what went down exactly. What the thousands of protesters who went down to Jena and their supporters around the country take issue with is the disproportionate dispensation of "justice," the lack of any sort of context for the attack in the charges brought against the six teens, and the very fact that there isn't any sort of law against a hanging a noose in a public place as a threat to African Americans. These parts of the story are given scant mention in Walters op-ed, and these are the reasons the case has created a resurgence of civil rights activism – not because anyone thinks that Mychal Bell is blameless.
--Kate Sheppard
