October 11, 2007

Jena Six football star back in jail

Mychal Bell, the All-State football star at the center of the Jena Six brouhaha, was today sentenced to jail for 18 months for his four previous convictions. See, stomping an unconscious kid wasn't part of his various probation deals that had allowed him to stay out of juvenile hall and on the football field for Jena H.S. in 2006:

'Jena 6' Teen Mychal Bell Back in Jail

The Associated Press

JENA, La. -- A teenager at the center of a civil rights controversy was back in jail Thursday after a judge decided the fight that put him in the national spotlight violated terms of his probation for a previous conviction, his attorney said.

Mychal Bell, who along with five other black teenagers is accused of beating a white classmate, had gone to juvenile court Thursday expecting another routine hearing, said Carol Powell Lexing, one of Bell's attorneys.

Instead, after a six-hour hearing, state District Judge J.P. Mauffrey Jr. sentenced him to 18 months in jail on two counts of simple battery and two counts of criminal destruction of property, Lexing said.

He had been hit with those charges before the Dec. 4 attack on classmate Justin Barker. Details on the previous charges, which were handled in juvenile court, were unclear.

We know that in one of those earlier "ajudications" (juvenile justicese for "convictions") the 5'-10", 185 pound fullback /middle linebacker (100 yards rushing and 12 tackles per game as a junior) who was being recruited by mighty LSU, was found guilty of punching a 17 year old girl in the face.

Is anybody other than the original small town reporter Abbey Brown and sportswriter Jason Whitlock ever going to realize that this isn't a story about poor oppressed sharecroppers getting lynched, it's a story about football stars who were coddled for years, until they finally went too far, because small towns in the South are crazy about high school football?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

26 comments:

Anonymous said...

Speaking of racial solidarity, have you looked at the book The Social Atom?

The full title is "The Social Atom: Why the Rich Get Richer, Cheaters Get Caught, and Your Neighbor Usually Looks Like You."

Right up your alley, no.

The author is interviewed in this Podcast.

Anonymous said...

Adjudication means a decision was reached, not necessarily a conviction. It is used in criminal (juvenile and adult) and civil cases as well.

Anonymous said...

Though yes, I know he was convicted. I'm just noting adjudication does not automatically mean that.

Anonymous said...

Steve,
There's a new noose story! There's not time to dwell on a story in Louisiana that is veering off the narrative.

daveg and his book: "The Social Atom: Why the Rich Get Richer, Cheaters Get Caught, and Your Neighbor Usually Looks Like You."

My neighbor does not look like me. I have the HUD's Mixed Income Housing project to thank for that. My zip code became a dumping ground for the very poor and just poor. The theory is that the middle class values of the original residents will rub off on these folks some of whom used to live in the projects.

It was never said how *we* would benefit, though. Actually, I truly understand what Professor Putnam meant about "hunkering down": I barely let my children outside to play; prisoner in my own home; Lord knows what is happening to housing values, etc.

Jewish Atheist said...

it's a story about football stars who were coddled for years, until they finally went too far, because small towns in the South are crazy about high school football?

Unlike those pure, white-as-the-driven snow lacrosse players at Duke that you were similarly dismissive about. *eyeroll*

Anonymous said...

>>Mychal Bell... had gone to juvenile court Thursday expecting another routine hearing...

Oh, yeah, I'm the same way. My calendar is *packed* with routine hearings.

Anonymous said...

We're going to see more of Mychal Bell. Once he is released from jail he'll do something. He's another Lionel Tate in the making.

Anonymous said...

Robert Lindsay has really been ahead of the curve on a lot of this stuff.

Anonymous said...

You don't get out much do you, Jewish Atheist?

Glaivester said...

Unlike those pure, white-as-the-driven snow lacrosse players at Duke that you were similarly dismissive about. *eyeroll*

The difference being that no one denies that Mychal Bell did what he was accused of doing, and no one who stood up for the Duke lacrosse players did so on the grounds that the charges were inappropriate to the behavior they were accused of.

Ron Guhname said...

@ jewish atheist

"Unlike those pure, white-as-the-driven snow lacrosse players at Duke that you were similarly dismissive about. *eyeroll*"

Oh sure, the stories are the same: dozens of people watched the Duke guys rape the black girl. Steve's take on the stories was uninformed by the facts; he just doesn't like blacks.

Anonymous said...

JA –you seem to be implying a moral equivalence between the falsely accused Duke LAX players and the Jena 6 with your sarcastic “pure, white-as-the-driven snow” jab.

The three Duke LAX players are indeed guilty of being “white”, rich and male which made Crystal Magnum’s numerous fantastic and inconsistent stories so readily believable among the MSM, race hustlers like Jackson/Sharpton/NCAAP, angry studies or loonly left professors, Duke University administrators and tender hearted liberals like yourself.

While none of the three LAX players seem to have had any prior criminal history, Colin Finnerty was convicted after Nifong’s indictment of a misdemeanor simple assault for taunting a gay couple one night while drunk in Georgetown (although Finnerty did not physically touch anyone by the victims’ own accounts). This incident was only brought to trial because Nifong’s false indictment of Finnerty violated the terms of his first-time offender status.

Or perhaps your analogy was on how these athletes were both coddled. Even before indictments based only upon obviously dubious accusations, Duke cancelled the LAX season, fired the LAX coach, Duke’s President castigated them, 88 Duke professors thanked pot bangers urging castration for not waiting for any evidence and specific professors angrily demanded expulsion and punished LAX students by unfairly dropping grades. The local black and liberal community protested outside their house and stoked the fires of racism, the New Black Panther issued veiled death threats, the NCAAP issued error-filled legal documents on the case, the MSM did likewise and even put mugshots on the cover of Newsweek.

Maybe it was because the three accused attended a party where someone else had hired strippers and alcohol was present. It didn't seem to bother anyone that the mostly black basketball team also hired strippers for a party around the same time and virtually every college party of note serves acohol.

So exactly who do you think was coddling these LAX players?

Anonymous said...

Steve's premise seems to be that the mainstream media is obsessed with finding examples of "jim crow justice" in the deep south. But if that was true, why is it that very few people have heard of darryl hunt?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darryl_Hunt

Anonymous said...

Steve, do you really think that there's NO racial component to this case? I grant you that bell's status as a football star probably helped him avoid harsh punishment in the past. I also think that the fact that his previous victims were black helped too. Steve, 2/3 of Jena's white folks voted for David Duke back when he ran for senator. In fact, most of Louisiana's whites did:
David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader, last week announced his support for Jena's white residents, who voted overwhelmingly for him when he ran unsuccessfully for Louisiana governor in 1991.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-jena25_websep25,0,7139244,full.story?coll=chi_tab01_layout
Here's Duke himself:
Much has been made of the fact that I won an overwhelming majority of votes in Jena Louisiana in my election bids for U.S. Senator and for Governor. Such is said to falsely label the people in Jena as “racists.” In fact, I won the overwhelming majority of the White vote in the entire state of Louisiana, not just in Jena. Since the people of Jena voted for me twice to speak for them as their Senator and as their Governor, I will ardently speak for them now.
http://www.davidduke.com/general/david-duke-speaks-out-in-defense-of-jena-louisiana_2788.html
And no, I don't think that Louisiana's whites, whether in Jena or elsewhere, were simply misguided and fed up with the politicians in LA, as so many conservative commentators have said. I think the white community of Jena and the rest of Louisiana knew exactly who they were voting for.
It begs belief that a town that voted overwhelmingly for the former Grand Dragon of the Klu Klux Klan could be bereft of racism, or have a justice system that is unpolluted by bigotry.

Anonymous said...

The issue isn't about what the boys did. Most folks agree that the six black boys should be punished. The issue is about prosecutorial overreach that was going to charge these boys with attempted murder for a simple schoolyard fight, and which has only been reined in because attention has been shed on this case by bloggers and now the mainstream media. Mr. Parks should be up in arms about Big Government here, as he was during the Duke rape case...which involved guys who were not choir boys either.

Anonymous said...

JewishAthiest - I wasnt aware that the Duke players had strings of previous convictions which their elite status had shrugged off. Im suprised this revelation hasnt been spread more widely.

Or are you being ironic and Im too stupid to realise?

Anonymous said...

Steve, 2/3 of Jena's white folks voted for David Duke back when he ran for senator. In fact, most of Louisiana's whites did:

So, can we come to the same conclusion for Israelis, who have placed Avigor Leiberman in a major cabinet position?

Anonymous said...

Anon at 6:51 said:


Mr. Parks should be up in arms about Big Government here, as he was during the Duke rape case...which involved guys who were not choir boys either.


So, Anon, tell me which one of the non-choir boys beat his girlfriend so badly he damaged her eye socket? Which one of them threw a bicycle through someone's window? Also, which one of them was on probation for four previous offenses?

Oh, yeah, when did the three of them stomp on a guy they had already knocked out?

If that is what you mean by not choir boys, I guess that the Jena 6 must be savages by comparison.

Anonymous said...

The Duke lacrosse players committed no crime, and did nothing wrong. (Except invite a stripper to strip for them - something that every sitcom celebrates as a fun way to celebrate an employee's or wife's birthday).

While the Jena 6 are hardened criminals in and out of court, who stomped a kid nearly to death. That is a crime.

So, to summarize:

1 - Duke players: normal non-criminals

2 - Jena 6: violent criminals

See the difference, Jewish A?

Anonymous said...

So, can we come to the same conclusion for Israelis, who have placed Avigor Leiberman in a major cabinet position?

Hey, you're talking to a left wing anti-Zionist here. I think Israelis Jews are, collectively, a bunch of fascistic maniacs, much like the whites of Louisiana.

And to befair, voting for Duke wasn't the worst thing LA whites have done. I think voting for Bush was far worse.

Anonymous said...

It is like I said earlier. If Jena was full of racists and if the justice system down there was full of klansmen, why didn't they nail Bell to the wall for his previous offenses? Bell has a criminal record. So there were plenty of chances for racists in the judicial to lock him up before the whole Jena 6 stuff. Instead, he was able to continue his criminal behavior. He was given plenty of 2nd chances to go straight.
The Duke boys were targets because they were white, period. I don't remember any of the feminists, leftists, the media getting agitated about the actual rapes that were and still taking place by black athletes across the country. I wonder why?

Anonymous said...

It is like I said earlier. If Jena was full of racists
And it is. At least 2/3 of the white population is anyway.
justice system down there was full of klansmen
Its hard to imagine that if the ordinary folks of Jena voted for a Klansmen, that the cops, prosecutors, and judges, who are probably even MORE conservative than the rest of the population, didn't also vote for that neo-Nazi and former Grand Wizard of the Klu Klux Klan (or was he a Grand Dragon? Perhaps a Grand Cyclops, like Robert Byrd? I can never keep these things straight).
why didn't they nail Bell to the wall for his previous offenses?
Here's my hypothesis, which seems pretty reasonable on the face of it:
Because Bell's previous victims were black. This latest one is white.
Indeed, I remember reading an article in the A.P. where a black resident interviewed complained that he had called the police several times in response to Bell's trouble making in his neighborhood, and the police took up to an hour to get their in some cases. Unfortunately, the link is now dead.
Does this mean that Jena's justice system cares less about black victims of crime than white ones? I don't know. Someone should look into that.
I do know that 2/3 of Jena's white residents voted for David Duke. That means that those 2/3 are either positively racist or at least willing to go along for the ride. Now, usually, cops and prosecutors have political opinions that are well to the right of the general population. That means that the vast majority of the cops and prosecutors in Jena probably voted for Duke as well. In fact, probably an even greater proportion did than the rest of the town.

Anonymous said...

"I don't remember any of the feminists, leftists, the media getting agitated about the actual rapes that were and still taking place by black athletes across the country. I wonder why?"
Do you know who Darryl Hunt is? Look him up. He's a black man who spent twenty years in prison for a false rape accusation by a white woman. Even after he was exonerated by DNA evidence, they kept in the slammer for years. He lived in a North Carolina town called Winston-Salem, not far from Duke University. And yet, while the lacrosse boys never even went to trial (despite the pain they must have felt to be falsely accused of rape), Darry Hunt didn't have the privilige these boys had. Have you ever heard of Darryl Hunt, and if not, why not? Especially if the media is so desperate for examples of "Jim Crow justice," as you claim.

Anonymous said...

If only Darryl Hunt had wealthy leftists coming out of the woodwork for him, like Mumia, he might not have had to spend all that time locked up. Too bad really.

Anonymous said...

Anon -10/13/2007 3:11 PM

Didn't know one of the duke kids (Colin Fenerty) beat the hell out of a gay guy for which he was convicted?



Bell is one person, that is not what the case is about.

He deserves jail time but not the railroad sentence they tried to put on him.

Anonymous said...

Anyone have more info on the 17-yo girl that he punched in the face?