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The remaining five Jena Six defendants pleaded to reduced charges yesterday, ending a court case that dragged on for two and a half years and sparked national controversy.
In the fall of 2006, three white students hung nooses from a tree on the grounds of Louisiana’s Jena High School, a mostly-white school in a rural part of the state, and school administrators called the incident a harmless prank.
A few months later a white student was beaten at school by six blacks, later identified as the Jena Six. Though no weapons were used in the assault, and the victim suffered no long-term physical harm, the six were initially charged with attempted murder, and one was convicted by an all-white jury of charges that carried a maximum jail term of twenty-two years. (His conviction was later thrown out, after which he pled guilty to a reduced charge.)
The other five defendants remained in legal limbo until yesterday, when each pleaded no contest to misdemeanor charges of simple battery. Each will pay $500 to $1,000 in court costs and fines, and will be placed on unsupervised probation for seven days. A civil lawsuit filed by the beating victim was settled immediately before the sentencing for undisclosed terms.
The five remaining Jena Six defendants are expected to plead guilty to reduced charges today. No information on the specifics of the plea deal has been released.
The Jena Six were students at Jena High School in Jena, Louisiana, in 2006 when they were accused of beating a white youth. The incident followed months of racial conflict at the school.
The Six were charged with attempted murder in the wake of the beating, a far more serious charge than any white student involved in similar recent assaults. Wikipedia has a detailed discussion of the ensuing controversy here.
One member of the Jena Six pled guilty to battery in late 2007.
In an unexpectedly lopsided 8-1 vote, the United States Supreme Court this morning ruled that the 2003 school strip search of eighth grader Savana Redding was unconstitutional.
I wrote about oral arguments in the case, Safford v. Redding, here, here, and here. Today’s Supreme Court ruling can be found here. I’ll have more on the decision next week.
Evening update: Here’s some interesting coverage of the decision from Pandagon, Meanwhile, the Washington Post wonders whether this is Justice Souter’s last opinion.
Cripchick has a great, thorough post up on how to ensure that your events are accessible to everyone. Here’s the list of topics she covers:
- childcare
- sliding pay scales
- different ways of getting information out
- gender-neutral bathrooms
- food options
- wheelchair and other mobility-related access
- structured schedules and awareness of time
- alternative formats
- audio description
- accessible language
- understanding different learning styles
- access to quiet space
- commitment to being anti-oppression
- trigger warnings
- arrangements for carpools/room sharing
- identities and experiences
There’s more in comments, too. Go read.
A new book, The Third Reich and the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses, examines American academics’ response to the rise of Nazism, specifically noting that many “maintained amicable relations with the Third Reich” until after (sometimes well after) Kristallnacht, in 1938.
Over at The Volokh Conspiracy, David Bernstein makes a provocative point about that subject:
While Germany from 1933 through 1938 treated Jews very badly, it wasn’t until Kristallnacht that one could say that Germany was more vicious in its treatment of minorities than, say, Mississippi. American universities certainly weren’t boycotting Mississippi, so it strikes me as an obvious issue of hindsight bias to argue that American universities that were exceedingly tolerant of domestic racism should be specifically excoriated for paying little attention to foreign anti-Semitism, just because in historical retrospect we know that German anti-Semitism led to the Holocaust.
Without getting into an argument about whether one or the other was “more vicious,” I’d say that Bernstein doesn’t go far enough here. Many Americans put the German racism of the mid-1930s in a different category than the American racism of the same era not because of hindsight bias, but also because they don’t fully grasp, or haven’t fully come to terms with, just how brutal and horrific our country’s 20th century racial legacy actually is.
(I should note, by the way, that I’m not vouching for the rest of Bernstein’s post. I strongly disagree with parts of his arguments about Spanish fascism and American Stalinism, but that’s another topic for another time.)
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