Paging Revs Jackson and Sharpton

As you can tell by my output today, yes the packing is as done as it can be. The real estate sales agreement has been signed and now begins the waiting game. So that means I can get back to posting on a more regular basis!

Remember all of the hubbub over the plight of the Jena 6? Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton were all over the news decrying Mychal Smith's trial saying that the jury was biased because there were no African Americans on the jury. What the Reverends Jackson and Sharpton didn't mention (as I pointed out over at Anti Strib) was that African Americans were called to report for Jury Duty but they didn't show up.

Meanwhile, there are real cases where African Americans were specifically excluded from the jury pool in order to taint the prosecution of the case. The good news is that the Supreme Court is taking up one of these cases in an effort to correct a judicial travesty.

Jim Williams had a reputation as a highly skilled, tenacious prosecutor -- maybe even a little bloodthirsty.

After scoring convictions in dozens of murder cases, he told a reporter: "It got to the point where there was no thrill for me unless there was a chance for the death penalty."

In the mid-'90s, Williams posed for Esquire magazine standing behind a miniature electric chair with mug shots of five African American men he sent to death row. Since then, two of the defendants have been exonerated, two had their sentences commuted to life because of misconduct by Williams, and the fifth won a retrial after an appeals court overturned the verdict.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court is to review another case in which Williams obtained a death sentence against a black man. The key question is whether Williams violated Allen Snyder's constitutional rights by removing all the potential black jurors at the start of his 1996 trial.

What gets me is how Williams closed the trial.

At the end of the trial, Williams exhorted the all-white jury to give Snyder a
death sentence because the case was "very, very similar" to the "most famous
murder case" just a year earlier, in which former football star O.J. Simpson
"got away with it."

Give him the death penalty because OJ "got away with it"....yeah that's a real good reason to take a persons life....

It is precisely for this reason that I have no respect for civil rights "leadership" in America today. The do not stand up for the people that really need their help, instead going to for the "show trial". Maybe when they start standing up for the little guy I'll come around, but until then...

Oh - and I can't wait to see the Strib and the rest of the dead tree media pick up on this story. I'm willing to take bets now that they don't even touch it! It's just not "sexy" enough for them.