The California justice system sent a message out yesterday, a pretty big message. The message being that if your black and commit a hate crime against a white person you will get a slap on the wrist.
I highly doubt, actually I am almost 100% sure, that if the roles were reversed the outcome would have been much different.
What am I talking about? This case:
The three victims – two of whom are 19 and the third 21 – agreed to sit down with a Press-Telegram reporter and discuss the painful attack in the hope that someone who knows the culprits will turn them in to police.
The young women asked to be identified by only their first names of Laura, Michelle and Lauren because they and their families fear for their safety. The assault, they said, was so savage they thank God they are alive.
The victims – along with throngs of other people – had gone to the 3800 block of Linden Avenue around 9:30 p.m. for a popular Halloween block party. As they walked up to an elaborate haunted house, they said, a group of about a dozen males began taunting them.
"They asked us, `Are you down with it?,’ we had no idea what that meant so we didn’t say anything and just walked by them up to the haunted house," said Laura, "They were grabbing their crotches – we didn’t know if it was a gang thing or what."
After making their way through a maze at the house, the three girls said they were back in the same spot where they were confronted and next to the same guys, who again taunted them. Still saying nothing, the three victims tried to walk away but were pelted with lemons and small pumpkins that split the seams on their costumes and left lumps and bruises on their bodies.
The taunts and jeers grew more aggressive, the victims recalled, as did the size of the crowd. Now females joined in, and everyone began saying "We hate white people, f— whites!"
At this point, the girls began to run, but the pack of assailants ran ahead of them and kept them surrounded.
"It was like animals, like a pack of hyenas," Michelle said.
She was trying to call 911 on her cell phone when the taunts began, but kept getting busy signals. She tried three times to call, she said, but never got through to an operator.
The suspects also began to gradually separate the girls, first by grabbing Laura by her long hair and yanking her backward.
She said she tried to fight off a group of girls who surrounded her and were clawing and hitting her, but then a man came up and slammed her in the head with a skateboard, knocking her unconscious.
"One of the witnesses told the police that he saw my legs go straight up in the air and I hit the ground face first," she said, accounting for the bumps and bruises on her forehead and around her nose and eyes.
Her friends watched, horrified as the man raised the skateboard over his head and slammed her again as she lay on the ground. Others in the pack also began to hit and kick her motionless body.
Fearing their friend would be killed, the other two girls rushed to her aid.
Lauren was the first at Laura’s side, and a group of people immediately jumped on her and began punching her in the face and back of the head simultaneously. Some kicked her in the back of knees, causing her legs to buckle. At one point, when they got her cell phone away from her, Lauren said she knelt down to try and retrieve the phone.
"Once I knelt down, there was too much of a force on top of me to get back up," she said. "They were pounding on my back, on my head. … They were kicking at the ball that was me."
Lauren suffered 12 fractures in her face, including four to her eye socket, three to her nose and three to her cheek.
Doctors don’t yet know if she will regain all of her eyesight. Until the swelling goes down, they won’t know if she’ll require surgery to repair the many broken bones.
Forced to drop her college photography classes this semester because she cannot see well enough to use the camera, Lauren also can’t blow her nose or sleep lying down. The pressure, doctors told her, could cause any of the fractured bones to shift, which could lead to her eye becoming detached from the shattered socket.
Michelle said she saw the group drag Lauren down as she rushed up and knocked the man with the skateboard off Laura. But then he then turned on her, punching her in both sides of her face and in the ribs.
Her face, like Lauren’s and Laura’s, is bruised and swollen. The lining that surrounds her lungs is also bruised.
As the man beat on Michelle, Laura regained consciousness and tried to pull him off her friend. But others in the pack immediately began to hammer at her again, she said.
She, like Lauren, suffered a concussion as well as multiple contusions. The lumps and marks on the back of her head and her back show where she was stomped, kicked and punched as she lay on the ground.
In all, the attack lasted about 10 minutes, and it ended only when a Good Samaritan driving by the melee stopped and physically blocked the battered girls bodies while yanking the assailants off the victims.
Maybe because he was also black, or because he was so tall and strong, the group broke up and scattered to several cars and fled, the victims said.
"If it wasn’t for that guy, honestly, I don’t think these two would be here today," Michelle said.
9 people were arrested and charged with a hate crime. All were found guilty of assault to commit great bodily injury and 8 of them were found to have committed a hate crime. So how were they sentenced?
Four of nine black teens convicted in the beating of three young white women were sent home Friday in a judge’s ruling that stunned both sides in the case.
Tears of joy were shed by relatives of the first convicted teen to hear his sentence of probation with 60 days of house arrest.
At the same time, one of the victims – 19-year-old Laura – collapsed onto her mother’s shoulder and sobbed as members of her family shook their heads in disbelief.
All four of the teens sentenced Friday – the 18-year-old male, his 18-year-old twin sister, his 16-year-old younger sister and his 16-year-old girlfriend – were sentenced to house arrest and probation.
Now that’s justice.
Sigh….
John Ridley has one question:
So in the aftermath of this whole mess there is one thing that stands out to me: the conspicuous absence from the scene of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. How is it that these two men, these two supposed champions of racial justice who went into a fit of histrionics when Michael Richards went on his "nigger" rant, were nowhere to be found when actual racial hatred manifest itself.
The simple fact is, and this is no revelation but rather confirmation of what has been painfully obvious going on decades, neither Jesse nor Al are truly committed to any ideal higher than raising their own profile. To a degree, as with any public advocate, that’s to be expected. It is a profile that gives one a platform from which to advance an agenda.
But somewhere along the way Jesse and Al lost sight of an agenda based on true justice. Assuming they ever had one.
Jesse, for example, rushed up to offer to pay the college tuition of the accuser in the Duke "rape" case. When it was pointed out to him that it had yet to be determined if the accuser had in fact been assaulted (and we’re starting to get a pretty good idea of the reality of that) Jesse was asked if he would still pay the tuition if it turned out the woman was making false accusations. Jesse said that he would. Essentially he was offering to reward a woman for lying, for ruining young men’s lives. Is that the message we want to send our young sisters; lie for your supper? If the accused in the Duke case been black and the accuser white, if the horrid specter of the Scottsboro Boys or Emmett Till had been infused in the case would Jesse have been as eager to throw money at the accuser?
Doubtful.
For his part the Reverend Al has got Tawana Brawley to live down. And for his role in that fiasco he’s never once manned up to giving an apology.
For either man, using the "Halloween hate crime" as an opportunity to prove their true commitment to racial justice would have been a welcome reversal to the years of descent into self-parody in which they have been sliding.
But instead we heard crickets from Jesse and Al. Those who champion racial equality and justice for all were no where to be found on this case. Instead, incredibly, some of the activists were upset because they felt the police looked to hard for the suspects because they were black. Not like it was a hate crime or anything.
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Very very sad–and another reason why the black community will continue to struggle to assert themselves; repeatedly playing the victim card and trusting charlatans like Sharpton and Jackson have kept them from becoming independent and constructive members of society. What does this punishment do to change the dangerous course these criminals are heading in? I hope an appeal is in the works.
Thankfully, there are black men and women who they can look up to: Condi Rice, Jesse Lee Peterson, Michael Steele, and Bill Cosby (who came out swinging against the ‘black culture’ rubbish promoted by MTV).
I guess in these days of equalization(?) this is the price us “Crackers” (It’s okay to use certain words if you are one!) have to pay for the sins of our past. After all, are we all not guilty of slavery, and subjugation? Just because we’re born the “C”-word means we are fair targets, having been born with the original sin of bigotry! Personally I think all the remains of former slave-owners should be dug-up and shot annually, for the crap we have to deal with nowadays! But then again, we have such fine “Great-Dividers” amongst the black community to teach color-blindness…Ohh wait, I’ve got myself confused with a parallel universe where equality doesn’t have many contrary definitions!
The civil rights movement has evolved into reverse discrimination.