[gratefuldawg77]

Quote by: ruksak Well you can't deny the humor in this situation. A town of 3,000 people, over 2,000 of them being white, caught treating blacks and whites in a grossly disproportionate manner. Then besieged by 20,000 plus black protesters asking questions. You have to drop the fact that the racist Al Sharpton is in town. You have to forget which "team" you're on. Just think of this in a colorblind and personal aspect.

I'm not on anybody's team. Just the side of justice. We know the justice system is flawed; its based on humans, and humans are flawed. Its still the best, most fair in the world. when the justice system screws up, you challenge it in the legal arena, not by dragging a small town's reputation through the mud. When the Duke students were being railroaded they didn't blame the whole town, just Mike Nifong. In the end he was disbarred, as should happen to the Jena DA if he is being unfair.Where was Al Sharpton when the Duke rape case was going on, BTW? Why wasn't he standing up for the rights of those students?

If your high school child got caught up in a situation like this, made the mistake of joining his friends in an effort to jump and beat up a student who was, in all fairness, asking for trouble.

I do have a child, who is in elementary school, and I am already teaching her how to solve her problems without using violence. That's the key here. Its not a black or white issue to me. Six students beat one student with a shoe. It might seem comical but I could easily see how being hit hard enough with the sole of anything harder than a flip-flop could cause brain damage. I believe in a philosophy of non-violence and you know who is the model of non-violence for me- Dr. Martin Luther King. If the modern civil rights movement is going to make heroes out of thugs, they are losing alot of valuable allies.

Do you honestly think its fair for a 17 year old child to spend a great deal of the entirety of his life in prison, for beating up another kid? Yes it was a vicious attack. Although provoked. No, it there weren't life threatening injuries sustained. The victim attended a party later the same night that he was a victim of "attempted murder". What if Micheal Bell was your child? Are you willing to say its fair for him to sit in a state prison until the age of 37, for what was in essence, an ass kicking?

That conviction was overturned before these protests began. Its irrelevant. Like i said, mistakes are sometimes made in the criminal justice system but this one was already rectified. All I'm saying is violent thugs are no heroes of mine. The call them the "jena six" like they're som kind of martrys or something. They're just young punks who see their only avenue of social change as violence. They need to be incarcerated. End of story. I was kind of a nerd and picked on at school. I was able to move on.