Problem Chylde: Learning & Writing

The latest development in the Jena Six case calls attention to another problematic framework of the criminal [in]justice system: the plea bargain. According to the latest reports, Mychal Bell (the first of the six to be tried) has agreed to serve as a prosecution witness, if necessary, against the other five young men on trial for allegedly beating Justin Barker.

The first time I wrote about the problematic aspects of this case, I kept my focus on the exorbitant sentence the prosecuting shyster Reed Walters pursued against the six young men. But now we have plea bargaining, another legal construct in play that is attempting to undermine the credibility of the young men who claim to have no involvement in the beating. In a larger context, the credibility of using this case to highlight the disparities in sentencing and unfair treatment of people of color in the justice system also sits in jeopardy through this move.

In a typical year, more than 80% of trials in the U.S. resulted in plea bargains. The criminal justice system sweeps up people for the most minor offenses or no offenses at all. People end up in a situation where the choices are: take your chances and fight for your life, knowing the cards are stacked against you and that the system will try to punish you to the max (whether you did anything or not). Or bow down to the system and hope they might “go easier” on you. Many people know and have experienced the reality that in this country, the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty, the right to have a fair trial, to get an impartial jury, to even get the system to follow its own stacked deck of rules, is a cruel lie.

Capitalist “Just-US” and the Case of the Jena 6

Plea bargaining is the state’s most insidious power chip for filling the belly of the prison industrial complex. It embodies the essential difference between talking to the police and snitching – another dynamic that characterizes the criminal justice system as it stands now. The state holds liberty above a potential prisoner’s head because every person values his freedom – plea bargaining allows the person to state his price for standing as close to seeing the outside world as possible. Through the knowledge that person [allegedly] carries, he betrays his friends in the plea bargaining process and, on a moral level, himself.

And this dynamic is hardly new; the same system of exchanging one’s personal integrity and dignity at the expense of playing along with oppressive frameworks has thrived since the history of this country. The current liberty of white Americans and the monuments to their glory and might were (and still are) built with the hands and on the backs of people of color, yet we still turn a blind eye to what those frameworks rely upon to exist.

[T]he quiet acceptance of conquest and murder in the name of progress…is only one aspect of a certain approach to history, in which the past is told from the point of view of governments, conquerors, diplomats, leaders. It is as if they, like Columbus, deserve universal acceptance, as if they – the Founding Fathers, Jackson, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Kennedy, the leading members of Congress, the famous Justices of the Supreme Court – represent the nation as a whole. The pretense is that there really is such a thing as ‘the United States,’ subject to occasional conflicts and quarrels, but fundamentally a community of people with common interests. It is as if there really is a ‘national interest’ represented in the Constitution, in territorial expansion, in the laws passed by Congress, the decisions of the courts, the development in capitalism, the culture of education and the mass media.

“Columbus, The Indians, and Human Progress”

It is because of this sordid history and these full-scale manipulations of our institutions to benefit a few at the expense of many that we must look critically at these operations that grind people’s lives under its teeth everyday for the sake of “progress.”

Marcus Jones, the father of lead defendant [Mychal Bell] in the controversial Jena 6 case couldn’t have been any clearer.

”They sold Mychal out,” Jones said of the legal team representing Mychal Bell. ”I just don’t understand it.” Jones was as stunned as [was] much of America and the world [by] the news that Mychal Bell, 17, had pleaded guilty in the racially charged case that has ignited claims of judicial bias and ignited Black activisim not seen since the days of the Civil Rights Movement. Bell pleaded guilty to second degree battery for punching Justin Barker, a White teenager.

The news that Bell had agreed to an 18-month sentence and to pay restitution to the White teenager he now admits beating has caused many now to focus on the remaining five defendants, who will be offered the same plea agreement as Bell. It has also caused some to question Bell’s legal team, which sought the agreement with the LaSalle County District Attorney’s office.

Quoted in Mychal Bell as Prosecution Star Witness? – Jena Six Update

We delude ourselves heavily if we think the reasons that people with criminal records – like Bell – comply with plea bargains because they have epiphanies of guilt and not because the opportunity to cop a plea gives the only nugget of power a criminal has short of hiring a dream team, wielding some influence over the media machine, or bribing judicial and governmental officers. We further fool ourselves if we pretend that by giving these coerced confessions at the cost of leniency that the confessor’s word is now taken at face value.

They are young black men

six of one half a dozen of the other

even though the evidence is flimsy

the fact is one of those black boys was ” violent” and a career criminal

Therefore all of them must be,and if he says so it MUST be true.

Notice how he suddenly develops credibility if he’s willing to tell on other little brown boys.

The same boy who couldn’t be trusted

Who had to be a liar

becomes credible and worthy

with years of prison over his head

and because he’s black them five other boys must be the same way

One or Six All the Same Thing

Now, at the time when we should let history guide our responses to what will be yet another injustice masqueraded under the banner of “business as usual,” we have a barrier to our efforts to demand the system recognize the past as it moves forward into the present: the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act. After all, there are always two sides to every organized outcry against the oppression perpetrated by our institutions: it’s either a protest or a riot. And as Changeseeker notes, even the marching for constitutional and civil rights can require government “prevention” as advanced by this act.

From there, who knows? Jena Six activists may be forced to cop a plea.

EDIT: And in the meantime…the roaches pursue legal recourse for their rights. Fucking hell.

EDIT 2: This post is wonderful.

So let’s cut it down to the bone here; after a year of struggle by civil rights campaigners to get the ridiculously human schoolyard fight redefined as something other than assault with a deadly weapon, because, if the “why you’re picking on us?” folks in Jena are to believed then Jena is full of people who believe that the Boxer rebelliion was put down through western jesustude, rather than because bullets work. After a year the decision to down grade “tennis shoes” from the status of a deadly weapon back to an item of clothing was forced upon Jena, so that instead of six minors being charged as adults we have… six minors being charged as adults, some of them for a crime they probably didn’t commit anyway, even if you accept the whole nonsense of putting kids into adult prison for a schoolyard fight that even the most extreme pacifist would admit was kinda unavoidable at that point. But it’s at least no longer a charge that’s actively taking huge heaping ten gallon hats full of piss, and makes the marcottian style “buh…buh…buh…but we’re not racist!” pleas from Jena residents stretch belief beyond the breaking point.