UPDATE: The South Shall Be Risible Again ... and again ... and again!

posted by The Sailor @ 8:13 PM Permalink

(Previous posts here.)

Mychal Bell of the `Jena 6' Back in Jail

[...]
Mychal Bell, 17, was unexpectedly sent back to prison on Thursday after going to juvenile court in central Louisiana's LaSalle Parish for what he expected to be a routine hearing, Carol Powell Lexing, one of his attorneys said.
Instead, state District Judge J.P. Mauffrey Jr. decided Bell had violated probation and sentenced him to 18 months in jail on two counts of simple battery and two counts of criminal destruction of property, Lexing said.

"This matter was unrelated to the December 2006 event at Jena High School, and that case was not even mentioned in the court proceedings," District Attorney Reed Walters said Friday.
[...]
After the attack on Barker, Bell was originally charged with attempted murder, but the charges were reduced and he was convicted of battery. An appeals court threw that conviction out, saying Bell should not have been tried as an adult on that charge.
[...]
Bell's parents were also ordered to pay all court costs and witness costs, Sharpton said.

"I don't know what we're going to do," Jones said. "I don't know how we're going to pay for any of this. I don't know how we're going to get through this."
[...]
Bell, Robert Bailey Jr., Carwin Jones, Bryant Purvis and Theo Shaw were all initially charged _ as adults _ with attempted second-degree murder and conspiracy to commit the same. A sixth defendant was charged in the case as a juvenile.

Bell, who was 16 at the time, was convicted in June of aggravated second-degree battery and conspiracy to commit that crime. LaSalle Parish prosecutor Reed Walters reduced the charges just before the trial. Since then, both of those convictions were dismissed and tossed back to juvenile court, where they now are being tried.

There are so many things wrong here I don't know where to start.

So I'll start here: The judge who just sentenced Mychal Bell to 18 months, after he had already served 10 months of a sentence that was vacated, was the same adult court judge, District Judge J.P. Mauffrey, who sentenced him in the first place!

Defense lawyers were unable to get him to recuse himself. But it begs the question: Why was Mychal Bell supposed to be attending a Juvenile Court hearing but his original hanging judge was presiding?

Why, if it was Juvenile Court, were the precedings trumpeted to the news media? Aren't Juvenile precedings supposed to be secret?

Why is Mychal Bell being charged with violating probation when his conviction was vacated?

Why are his parents being ordered to pay court costs and witness costs, (in his Jena 6 trial he called no witnesses), of the prosecution? Is it because the double tragedy of sending your child back to jail and bankrupting your family will convince these folks to stop fighting The Man?

Why does Reed Walters, (the Walter Reed of American justice), say this has nothing to do with the Jena 6 conviction? It's the same judge! It's the same (vacated) conviction that the judge used as the reason to revoke him!

Why didn't Reed appeal the overturning of the conviction like he said he would? Was it because he knew the fix was in and he didn't have to?

And why, without any eyewitness accounts, any forensic evidence, was Mychal Bell convicted in the first place?



Cross posted at SteveAudio

Labels: Jena 6