When the agenda folks get into a case, they spread misinformation and try mightily to throttle truth.
The solution: less airtime for race hustlers, more for Mr. Whitlock and Ms. Barber.
After the huge hit taken by the forces of extreme political correctness when the Duke case was exposed as both baseless and an egregious example of prosecutorial abuse, political correctness extremists desperately needed to deflect attention from the vital lessons of the Duke case, replay the race card and claim victim status for someone to solidify the black bloc vote.
So they chose the prosecution of the Jena Six to target.
When Collin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann were wrongly indicted at the request of former rogue prosecutor Michael B. Nifong, La Shawn Barber stood for justice and against what Hillary Clinton might call "the willing suspension of disbelief."
Ms. Barber, April 11, 2006:
"Last month two black strippers worked a party given by members of Duke University's lacrosse team. One claims to have been gang-raped and beaten by several white members. As expected, the alleged incident has sparked ill-informed and premature outcries of racism and irrelevant rants about historic victimization by the white power structure, or something like that.
"In my deeply-held opinion, much of the outrage is based not on what may have happened to the stripper but on class envy and covetousness. A heavily black city...resents the heck out of the predominantly white private university in its midst, and a rape allegation provides an excuse to throw accusations of racism."
The call is out for Ms. Barber to expound upon the Jena situation and "the sweetheart of the blogosphere" is playing it coy: "Good grief. And I’ve lost count of the number of e-mails I’ve gotten from readers who want me to blog Jena Six. Why must I? Why must I? Why must I? I might; I might not."
Meanwhile, another Hero of the Hoax, Jason Whitlock is making sure his Kansas City Star readers are not gulled about the Jena Six.
Mr. Whitlock received these two paragraphs in the definitive book on the Duke case, Until Proven Innocent, by Stuart Taylor, Jr. and KC Johnson:
"A much stronger commentary came the next day from Jason Whitlock, an African-American sportswriter for The Kansas Ciity Star who was also then a regular panelist on ESPN's Sports Reporters. 'If the Duke lacrosse players were black and the accuser white,' wrote Whitlock, 'everyone would easily see the similarities between this case and the alleged crimes that often left black men hanging from trees in the early 1900s....If this were 1940, an angry white lynch mob would then gather at the scene of the alleged crime and promise to dole out justice to anyone they suspected of playing a role in the crime. In 2006, mixed-race prayer vigils and protests were held, and black community activists pressured the district attorney.
"Whitlock admitted that he did not know what had happened at the stripper party but asserted that the heroes of the civil rights movement did not battle apartheid and injustice 'so that poor, black and oppressed could surrender the moral high ground and attempt to inflict injustice on the privileged.' Whitlock urged African Americans in Durham to start demanding that the authorities 'pursue justice in the Duke case regardless of where that pursuit leads.' Those lonely pleas fell on deaf ears."
Mr. Whitlock's "Lessons from Jena, La."likewise should be required reading." Mr. Whitlock addressed reality instead of ignored what President Reagan called "pesky facts." He did not excuse either thuggish behavior or politically motivated prosecution.
Mr. Whitlock:
"Now we love Mychal Bell, the star of the 2006 Jena (La.) High School football team, the teenage boy who has sat in jail since December for his role in a six-on-one beatdown of a fellow student.
"Thursday, thousands of us, proud African-Americans, expressed our devotion to and desire to see justice for the 'Jena Six,”'the half-dozen black students who knocked unconscious, kicked and stomped a white classmate.
"Jesse Jackson compared Thursday’s rallies in Jena to the protests and marches that used to take place in cities like Selma, Ala., in the 1960s. Al Sharpton claimed Thursday’s peaceful demonstrations were to highlight racial inequities in the criminal justice system.
"Jesse and Al, as they’re prone to do, served a kernel of truth stacked on a mountain of lies.
"There are undeniable racial and economic inequities in our criminal justice system, and from afar the 'Jena Six' rallies certainly looked and felt like the righteous protests of the 1960s.
"But the reality is Thursday’s protests are just another sign that we remain deeply locked in denial about the path we need to travel today for true American liberation, equality and power in the new millennium.
"The fact that we waited to love Mychal Bell until after he’d thrown away a Division I football scholarship and nine months of his life is just as heinous as the grossly excessive attempted-murder charges that originally landed him in jail.
"Reed Walters, the Jena district attorney, is being accused of racism because he didn’t show Bell compassion when the teenager was brought before the court for the third time on assault charges in a two-year span.
"Where was our compassion long before Bell got into this kind of trouble?
"That’s the question that needed to be asked in Jena and across the country on Thursday. But it wasn’t asked because everyone has been lied to about what really transpired in the small southern town."
THAT's RIGHT! "everyone has been lied to about what really transpired in the small southern town."
When the agenda folks get into a case, they spread misinformation and try mightily to throttle truth.
Mr. Whitlock:
"There was no 'schoolyard fight' as a result of nooses being hung on a whites-only tree.
"Justin Barker, the white victim, was cold-cocked from behind, knocked unconscious and stomped by six black athletes. Barker, luckily, sustained no life-threatening injuries and was released from the hospital three hours after the attack.
"A black U.S. attorney, Don Washington, investigated the 'Jena Six' case and concluded that the attack on Barker had absolutely nothing to do with the noose-hanging incident three months before. The nooses and two off-campus incidents were tied to Barker’s assault by people wanting to gain sympathy for the 'Jena Six' in reaction to Walters’ extreme charges of attempted murder."
Yes, and they wanted to gain that sympathy for the Jena Six, despite their thuggish behavior, in order to give some respectability to extreme political correctness so devastatingly exposed in the Duke case and the definitive book on it, Until Proven Innocent.
Mr. Whitlock:
"Much has been written about Bell’s trial, the six-person all-white jury that convicted him of aggravated battery and conspiracy to commit aggravated battery and the clueless public defender who called no witnesses and offered no defense. It is rarely mentioned that no black people responded to the jury summonses and that Bell’s public defender was black.
"It’s almost never mentioned that Bell’s absentee father returned from Dallas and re-entered his son’s life only after Bell faced attempted-murder charges. At a bond hearing in August, Bell’s father and a parade of local ministers promised a judge that they would supervise Bell if he was released from prison.
"Where were the promises and supervision before any of this?
"It’s rarely mentioned that Bell was already on probation for assault when he was accused of participating in Barker’s attack. And it’s never mentioned that white people in the 'racist' town of Jena provided Bell support and protected his football career long before Jesse, Al, Bell’s father and all the others took a sincere interest in Mychal Bell.
"You won’t hear about any of that because it doesn’t fit the picture we want to paint of Jena, this case, America and ourselves."
Fortunately, Mr. Whitlock prefers to portray reality instead of a severely skewed alternative.
Surely many (but not all) have that "sincere interest."
The biggest problem, I suspect, is that people don't get ALL the facts.
Mr. Whitlock is right on target:
"We don’t practice preventive medicine. Mychal Bell needed us long before he was cuffed and jailed. Here is another undeniable, statistical fact: The best way for a black (or white) father to ensure that his son doesn’t fall victim to a racist prosecutor is by participating in his son’s life on a daily basis.
"That fact needed to be shared Thursday in Jena. The constant preaching of that message would short-circuit more potential 'Jena Six' cases than attributing random acts of six-on-one violence to three-month-old nooses.
"And I am in no way excusing the nooses. The responsible kids should’ve been expelled. A few years after I’d graduated, a similar incident happened at my high school involving our best football player, a future NFL tight end. He was expelled.
"The Jena school board foolishly overruled its principal and suspended the kids for three days.
"But the kids responsible for Barker’s beating deserve to be punished. The prosecutor needed to be challenged on his excessive charges. And we as black folks need to question ourselves about why too many of us can only get energized to help our young people once they’re in harm’s way."
Unfortunately, there are those who deliberately mislead by concealing or even lying about pertinent facts.
That's the biggest problem.
The solution: less airtime for race hustlers, more for Mr. Whitlock and Ms. Barber.
If that happened, perhaps this problem lamented by Mr. Whitlock would be solved: "I’ve been the spokesman for Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Kansas City for six years. Getting black men to volunteer to mentor for just two hours a week to the more than 100 black boys on a waiting list is a yearly crisis. It’s a nationwide crisis for the organization. In Kansas City, we’re lucky if we get 20 black Big Brothers a year."
Mr. Whitlock has the facts and the solution: "You don’t want to see any more 'Jena Six' cases? Love Mychal Bell before he violently breaks the law."
The Jena and Duke cases are different in critical respects.
Most importantly, the prosecutor tried to railroad the Duke Three on bogus charges. There was no rape, no sexual offense and no kidnapping and it swiftly became obvious.
The Jena case actually involved thuggish behavior, as Mr. Whitlock made very clear.
The prosecutor in the Jena case may have overcharged, but he did not make it up and conceal exculpatory evidence. He's far from being in Nifong's league.
Meanwhile, like Emma Peel in "The Avengers," La Shawn Barber is needed.
Michael J. Gaynor has been practicing law in New York since 1973. A former partner at Fulton, Duncombe & Rowe and Gaynor & Bass, he is a solo practitioner admitted to practice in New York state and federal courts and an Association of the Bar of the City of New York member.
Gaynor graduated magna cum laude, with Honors in Social Science, from Hofstra University's New College, and received his J.D. degree from St. John's Law School, where he won the American Jurisprudence Award in Evidence and served as an editor of the Law Review and the St. Thomas More Institute for Legal Research. He wrote on the Pentagon Papers case for the Review and obscenity law for The Catholic Lawyer and edited the Law Review's commentary on significant developments in New York law.
The day after graduating, Gaynor joined the Fulton firm, where he focused on litigation and corporate law. In 1997 Gaynor and Emily Bass formed Gaynor & Bass and then conducted a general legal practice, emphasizing litigation, and represented corporations, individuals and a New York City labor union. Notably, Gaynor & Bass prevailed in the Second Circuit in a seminal copyright infringement case, Tasini v. New York Times, against newspaper and magazine publishers and Lexis-Nexis. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed, 7 to 2, holding that the copyrights of freelance writers had been infringed when their work was put online without permission or compensation.
Gaynor currently contributes regularly to www.MichNews.com, www.RenewAmerica.com, www.WebCommentary.com, www.PostChronicle.com and www.therealitycheck.org and has contributed to many other websites. He has written extensively on political and religious issues, notably the Terry Schiavo case, the Duke "no rape" case, ACORN and canon law, and appeared as a guest on television and radio. He was acknowledged in Until Proven Innocent, by Stuart Taylor and KC Johnson, and Culture of Corruption, by Michelle Malkin. He appeared on "Your World With Cavuto" to promote an eBay boycott that he initiated and "The World Over With Raymond Arroyo" (EWTN) to discuss the legal implications of the Schiavo case. On October 22, 2008, Gaynor was the first to report that The New York Times had killed an Obama/ACORN expose on which a Times reporter had been working with ACORN whistleblower Anita MonCrief.