On August 1, Judge J.P. Mauffray Jr. was removed from the Jena 6 trial due to his highly biased remarks about the defendants.
|
|
Mauffray revealed his racist inclinations by calling the six Black youths “a violent bunch” and “real troublemakers.” Judge Thomas M. Yeager, who pulled Mauffray off the case, wrote, “The right to a fair and impartial judge is of particular importance in the present cases.”
Mauffray’s rulings against the six Black youth charged with felonies over a school scuffle were so racist they were three times overturned. A Louisiana appeals court ruled that Mychal Bell had to be tried as a juvenile and not as an adult as Mauffray had intended. Yeager previously prevented Mauffray from closing the Jena 6 proceedings to the public and media.
Despite the overturns, Mauffray has presided over nothing less than the legal lynching of the Jena 6. He let the six be put on trial for murder-related charges over what amounted to a school fight. He set bails between $70,000 and $138,000 for the six youths—unaffordable sums to their families of modest incomes—keeping the defendants in jail for months.
Victims of hate crimes put on trial
The events that led up to the Jena 6 trial exposes the deep-rooted racism that still prevails in the South.
In September 2006, a Black high school student was given permission by the school principal to sit under a tree where only white students usually congregated. The following day, three nooses were hanging from the “white tree.”
The three white students responsible for this racist act of terror were slapped on the wrist—they were suspended from school for three days. The school’s white superintendent explained, “Adolescents play pranks. I don’t think it was a threat against anybody.”
On Dec. 1, 2006, a few weeks after the nooses were hung from the tree, Black student Robert Bailey attended an all-white party by invitation. He was attacked and beaten by a crowd, which included Matt Windham and Justin Barker. Police arrived and told Bailey and his friends to “get back to their side of town.”
The next day, Bailey ran into Windham at a convenience store. Words were exchanged, and Windham pulled out a sawed-off shotgun. Bailey and other Black men with him successfully wrestled the gun from Windham’s hands and fled the scene. Windham was not arrested.
A couple of days later, Barker was on campus openly defending the white students who had hung the nooses, using the word “n****r” freely. In response, several Black students roughed up Barker, who was taken to the hospital and released the same day.
The Jena police did not proceed to arrest Windham, who assaulted Bailey with a gun. Nor were the students who hung the nooses ever charged with hate crimes for their racist act of intimidation. Rather, the police and the courts set out to persecute the six Black youth involved in the school fight.
Racist judge Mauffray’s removal from the case is a positive development but does not undo the racism built into this case. The fact the Jena 6 continue to be on trial attests to this.
Furthermore, the removal of one racist judge does not address the continued systematic criminalization of African American communities throughout the country. The case of the Jena 6 is only a stark example of the racism embedded in the justice system, from the police to the courts, not only in the South but across the country.
Revolutionaries and progressives should continue to champion the case while building the movement that will challenge the racist character of the justice system. Free the Jena 6!
