Jena 6 Teen Accepts Plea Deal

Mychal Bell, the teen at the center of the "Jena Six" case, pleaded guilty Monday to hitting a white classmate in an agreement that will allow him to go free by June.

In the agreement, Walters dropped conspiracy charges against Bell and reduced an aggravated battery charge to second-degree battery. Bell was sentenced to serve 18 months, which includes the year he already spent in jail.

He had been scheduled to go to trial Thursday. If convicted, he could have been sent to a juvenile facility until he was 21.

The deal allows Bell to be released to a group home and return to public school as early as Monday. He agreed to testify against the other five if their cases go to trial. Bell was also ordered to pay $935 toward court costs and Justin Barker's medical bills.

Bell had been held in an adult jail since last December. He was released in September after his conviction was overturned by an appeals court. He was sent to a juvenile facility in October for violating his probation on unrelated previous convictions for simple battery and criminal destruction of property.

Motion on 'Jena 6' Charges Is Dismissed

A judge rejected a motion to dismiss juvenile charges against a teenager at the center of a civil rights controversy. Lawyers for the teenager, Mychal Bell, left, one of six black teenagers accused of beating a white schoolmate, said that trying him again amounted to double jeopardy. “We contend that he can’t be tried for the same case twice, and he’s already been tried in adult court,” said one of the lawyers, Carol Powell Lexing. The judge, J. P. Mauffrey Jr. of District Court, rejected that motion. Ms. Lexing said they would appeal. Mr. Bell, 17, is the only one of the so-called Jena Six to stand trial. In June, he was convicted in adult court of aggravated second-degree battery and conspiracy. The convictions were later overturned, and the case was sent to juvenile court. Mr. Bell was ordered to jail last month for a probation violation in an unrelated juvenile-court case.

Charges against Jena 6 Defendant Reduced

Charges against Bryant Purvis, one of the six black students accused of being involved in beating a white student, were reduced to second degree aggravated battery during his arraignment Wednesday morning.

Purvis, who was facing charges of second-degree attempted murder and conspiracy, entered a not guilty plea to the reduced charges in the LaSalle Parish Courthouse in Jena.

Charges have now been reduced against at least five of the students in the racially charged "Jena 6" case. Charges against Jesse Ray Beard, who was 14 at the time of the alleged crime, are unavailable because he's a juvenile.

Civil rights leaders Martin Luther King III and Al Sharpton led more than 15,000 marchers to Jena -- a town of about 3,000 -- in September to protest how authorities handled the cases against Purvis and five other teens accused of the December 2006 beating of fellow student Justin Barker.

Jena 6 Case is Not Over

Black leaders plead to Justice

By GERARD SHIELDS
Advocate Washington bureau
Published: Sep 29, 2007 - Page: 1A

WASHINGTON — National civil-rights leaders said Friday that they will seek a meeting with President Bush if the U.S. Justice Department fails to enforce what they consider federal hate crimes in the Jena 6 case in Louisiana.

A contingent of leaders from four civil-rights groups said that they were “extremely disappointed” after a Friday meeting with the Justice Department, whom they said made no commitments to prosecute the hanging of nooses on a tree at Jena High School in LaSalle Parish and the posting of addresses of Jena 6 family members on Web sites.

“There is a very violent atmosphere and those people’s lives are in jeopardy,” said the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

A Justice Department spokesman said after the meeting that the agency, along with the FBI, is investigating the Jena incidents and are taking the allegations seriously.

In addition to prosecuting the incidents, Jackson called for the department to force the district attorney and judge in the Jena 6 case to recuse themselves from further proceedings.

Jackson, president of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, was joined by Marc Morial, president of The National Urban League and a former New Orleans mayor. Julian Bond, chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Dennis Courtland Hayes, interim NAACP president and CEO, and Barbara Arnwine, executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, also participated in the two-hour meeting.

As a result of Friday’s meeting, Jackson said the group has asked for a meeting with the interim U.S. attorney general and will call for a meeting with Bush if the group’s requests aren’t satisfied. Jackson also suggested that a march on the Justice Department offices could occur.

Justice Department officials told the civil-rights contingent on Friday that the cases involving hanging nooses were closed, Jackson said. “We see this as a real retreat for civil-rights enforcement,” he said.

The case of the Jena 6 rocketed to the public eye over the past several months, drawing national and international media attention.

Up to 20,000 people poured into Jena on Sept. 20 from across the country in a peaceful demonstration to support Mychal Bell and the five other black defendants — Bryant Purvus, Carwin Jones, Jesse Ray Beard, Theo Shaw and Robert Bailey Jr. — accused of beating white Jena High School student Justin Barker Dec. 4. The defendants have been released on bail.

The Rev. Al Sharpton has led a public charge since last spring and maintained that racial tensions started at the high school in August 2006 when a black student asked school officials at a student assembly whether he could sit under a tree traditionally used as a gathering place by white students. The next day nooses were hung in the tree. The three white students who hung the nooses were suspended.

The Jena 6 were first charged with attempted second-degree murder. That later was lowered to aggravated second-degree battery and conspiracy. Until his conviction, Bell was held on $90,000 bond. Once convicted, his bond request was denied because he has a juvenile record, including adjudications for battery.

Bell, who was 16 at the time of his arrest in Barker’s beating, was convicted in adult court by an all-white jury in June on the battery charge and was to have been sentenced Sept. 20. But the conviction was overturned Sept. 14 by the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeal, ruling the case should have filed in juvenile court.

LaSalle Parish District Attorney Reed Walters announced that same day he planned to appeal the court’s decision. But Walters said Thursday that he had since decided to let Bell’s case stay in juvenile court.

Meanwhile, families of the Jena 6 have been threatened on Web sites and radio shows, Morial said. “We believe they are actions that should be prosecuted by this nation’s civil-rights laws and this nation’s hate crimes laws,” he said.

Said Hayes: “Jena is not over with. We have much work to do.”

Denver To Hold Rally In Support Of "Jena 6"

"Tonight, a group of artists and activists plan to hold a rally and "speak out" at Blackberries cafe in Denver's Five Points neighborhood to show support for the Jena 6. There will be speeches and music and spoken-word performances. There will also be information on how to help the youths or how to contact Jena and Louisiana officials."

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The Case of the "Jena 6" Is An Eerie Reminder of the Case of the "Scottsboro Boys"

Scottsboro Boys
"The case of the Scottsboro Boys arose in Scottsboro, Alabama during the 1930s, when nine black youths, ranging in age from sixteen to twenty, were accused of raping two white women, one of whom would later recant.

The trials, in which the youths were convicted and sentenced to death by all-white juries despite the weak and contradictory testimonies of the witnesses, are regarded as one of the worst travesties of justice perpetrated against blacks in the post-Reconstruction South.

The case quickly became an international cause célèbre and the boys were represented by the American Communist Party's legal defense organization. The death sentences, originally scheduled to be carried out quickly, were postponed pending appeals that took the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the sentences were overturned. Despite the fact that one of the women later denied being raped, the retrials resulted in convictions. All of the defendants were eventually acquitted, paroled, or pardoned (besides one who escaped), some after serving years in prison.

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On March 25, 1931,[1] a fight broke out between a group of black men and a group of white men riding in a car of a Southern Railway freight train.[2] All of the white men and boys, except Orville Gilley (key witness in trial) were forced to jump off. When the train stopped in Paint Rock, Alabama, the nine black youths were arrested on charges of assault. Two young white women dressed in boys' clothing — Victoria Price, aged 21, and Ruby Bates, aged 17 — were also found catching a free ride on the freight train. All were taken to Scottsboro, Alabama, the Jackson County seat. The two girls, unemployed mill workers and part-time prostitutes from nearby Huntsville, told authorities they had been brutally gang raped by the nine blacks taken into custody in Scottsboro.

Twelve days after the men had been arrested the first trial took place. They were all kept in jail cells just feet away from the electric chair chamber where they were made to hear and smell the electrocutions of the other members of death row; this was later deemed cruel and unusual punishment. Their lawyer was Milo Moody, a Tennessee lawyer unfamiliar with Alabama law, who met with the boys for just 25 minutes before the case was presented to a judge. Some accounts said that he was drunk for the duration of the trials. When called to testify, the boys began to blame and accuse each other , which made the case worse. Haywood Patterson and the other 8 defendants were found guilty of raping the two white girls.

The case was overturned on appeal dues to lack of fair and adequate legal representation, and the retrial was moved from Scottsboro to Decatur, AL. A well known lawyer, Samuel Liebowitz, from New York, came to the defense of the boys pro-bono. The prosecuting lawyer was Thomas E. Knight, and Judge Edwin Horton presided.

In the November 1932 re-trials Ruby Bates told the courts that she and Victoria Price had not been raped by the accused, explaining that the two had made up the story to avoid vagrancy charges (the prosecution accused her of being bought off by the Communist Party (which was supporting the defendants' case). Later in the trials, a witness who owned a farm near the railways came forward, claiming to have seen the alleged crime take place. When asked if he could identify what the two girls were wearing, he stated that they were both wearing dresses, despite the fact it had been earlier established that they were both wearing overalls in an attempt to pass as male. Medical examinations found the girls had no scarring indicating rape. In fact they were found to have engaged in consensual sex while traveling with the white men the night before. Despite the insurmountable evidence in their favor, all of the defendants were found guilty for a second time and sentenced to death. On June 22, 1933, Judge Horton threw out the verdict of the trial and subsequently lost his position as judge."

Central Floridians Lend Support For The "Jena 6"

"On Thursday, people across Central Florida are joining a protest taking place hundreds of miles away.

The protest is in support of the Jena 6. Many who couldn't make the trip to Louisiana are planning to show their support in other ways. Meanwhile thousands of people from across the country are descending on the small town." |Read more|

North Texans Are Rallying Behind The "Jena 6"

"More than 1,000 people from North Texas loaded into chartered buses, piled into rental vans and slid behind the wheels of cars Wednesday, joining an overnight caravan of national civil rights protesters expected to overwhelm a two-stoplight Louisiana town today." |Read more|

Town Braces For Massive Rally In Support Of "Jena 6"

"By 8 a.m. ET Thursday, thousands of people had arrived for the rally and some parking areas in the small town were full.

"This is a march for justice. This is not a march against whites or against Jena," said the Rev. Al Sharpton, a civil rights activist and one of the protest organizers.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, Martin Luther King III, and hip-hop artist Mos Def also are expected to attend.

Barricades have gone up around the local courthouse and Louisiana state troopers said they will be out in force to keep the peace, as the demonstrators protest what they feel are excessive criminal charges and bond amounts for the teens, dubbed the "Jena 6."" |Read more|

Thousands To Rally For "Jena 6"

"What has become known as the "Jena Six" case began last September, when a black high school student sat under a tree traditionally, although not officially, reserved for whites. The next day, three nooses were hanging from the tree. Three white students were briefly suspended.

Then, in December, a white student was beaten up by six black schoolmates outside the school gymnasium. The black students were charged with attempted murder.

Eventually, those charges were reduced to offenses such as aggravated battery. In June, Bell was found guilty of second-degree battery charges. On Friday, the state 3rd Circuit Court of Appeal threw out his conviction, saying he had been improperly tried as an adult. Bell, now 17, remains in custody while prosecutors decide whether to file new charges against him in juvenile court." |Read more|