Over the past couple of days, a few important things have happened re: the Jena Six. Most importantly, due to pressure, Judge J.P. Mauffray Jr. threw out Mychal Bell’s conspiracy conviction, leaving him with only an aggravated second-degree battery conviction, which carries up to 15 years. Not great, but much better than the 100 years he originally faced with the conspiracy and attempted murder charges, and even the 22 he faced before the conspiracy conviction was dropped.
ageorgegal has a more thorough rundown at the Afrospear, and Kevin has some great analysis over at Slant Truth.
Also, the charges faced by Carwin Jones and Theo Shaw have been dropped to conspiracy and aggravated second-degree battery, from conspiracy and attempted murder. [Source] This means that they face the same 22 year potential sentence that Mychal Bell did; however, because Mychal Bell’s conspiracy conviction was tossed because he was tried as an adult, if the prosecutors choose to try Jones and Shaw as juveniles, they might not have it thrown out if they are convicted.
That said, I think that the campaigns by Color of Change, as well as Tom’s petition (which now has over 174,000 signatures!) have done a lot to get this case the attention it deserves in the mainstream media.
Because the mainstream media (and I include blogs like DailyKos, Huffington Post and FDL in this, because they’re just as read and just as bad) sure as hell wasn’t paying any attention to the bloggers who have been writing about it for FOUR MONTHS. Seriously, Sylvia wrote about it on May 22, plenty of others followed her lead, my first post about the Jena Six was on May 9, and it was on the LJ communities before that.
As Black Amazon pointed out, they weren’t paying attention to the fucking BBC, who published several stories starting on MAY 24. It’s been in other European news. That just shows how fucked up race is in the U.S., that the mainstream media will stonewall a story to the point where they get scooped by the news media in other hemispheres.
The case was ignored by every major U.S. news source outside of Louisiana except for the Chicago Tribune. I can’t even remember the AP having more than one or two stories before this week. Well, they’re paying attention now, and while I’m glad that the case is finally getting the attention it deserves, why did it take so long? What the hell happened to journalistic integrity, editors and reporters? Why did Counterpunch have to break this story?
And still a senator who may or may not have attempted to have consensual gay sex and primaries we’re six months away from are bigger news than six teenagers whose lives were ruined because their school’s administration and their town’s law encforcement had shown beyond the shadow of a doubt that they were not going to be protected from racist attacks, and because our justice system sucks.
