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Title: To some in Paris (TX), sinister past is back (14 year old girl gets 7 years for shoving incident)
Source:
Chicago Tribune
URL Source: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ ... e=1&coll=chi-leisureadvice-col
Published: Mar 12, 2007
Author: Howard Witt
Post Date: 2007-03-23 15:29:49 by Red Jones
Keywords: None
Views: 175
Comments: 14
To some in Paris, sinister past is back In Texas, a white teenager burns down her family's home and receives probation. A black one shoves a hall monitor and gets 7 years in prison. The state NAACP calls it `a signal to black folks.' By Howard Witt Tribune senior correspondent March 12, 2007 PARIS, Texas -- The public fairgrounds in this small east Texas town look ordinary enough, like so many other well-worn county fair sites across the nation. Unless you know the history of the place. There are no plaques or markers to denote it, but several of the most notorious public lynchings of black Americans in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries were staged at the Paris Fairgrounds, where thousands of white spectators would gather to watch and cheer as black men were dragged onto a scaffold, scalded with hot irons and finally burned to death or hanged. Brenda Cherry, a local civil rights activist, can see the fairgrounds from the front yard of her modest home, in the heart of the "black" side of this starkly segregated town of 26,000. And lately, Cherry says, she's begun to wonder whether the racist legacy of those lynchings is rebounding in a place that calls itself "the best small town in Texas." "Some of the things that happen here would not happen if we were in Dallas or Houston," Cherry said. "They happen because we are in this closed town. I compare it to 1930s." There was the 19-year-old white man, convicted last July of criminally negligent homicide for killing a 54-year-old black woman and her 3-year-old grandson with his truck, who was sentenced in Paris to probation and required to send an annual Christmas card to the victims' family. There are the Paris public schools, which are under investigation by the U.S. Education Department after repeated complaints that administrators discipline black students more frequently, and more harshly, than white students. And then there is the case that most troubles Cherry and leaders of the Texas NAACP, involving a 14-year-old black freshman, Shaquanda Cotton, who shoved a hall monitor at Paris High School in a dispute over entering the building before the school day had officially begun. The youth had no prior arrest record, and the hall monitor--a 58-year-old teacher's aide--was not seriously injured. But Shaquanda was tried in March 2006 in the town's juvenile court, convicted of "assault on a public servant" and sentenced by Lamar County Judge Chuck Superville to prison for up to 7 years, until she turns 21. Just three months earlier, Superville sentenced a 14-year-old white girl, convicted of arson for burning down her family's house, to probation. "All Shaquanda did was grab somebody and she will be in jail for 5 or 6 years?" said Gary Bledsoe, an Austin attorney who is president of the state NAACP branch. "It's like they are sending a signal to black folks in Paris that you stay in your place in this community, in the shadows, intimidated." The Tribune generally does not identify criminal suspects younger than age 17, but is doing so in this case because the girl and her family have chosen to go public with their story. None of the officials involved in Shaquanda's case, including the local prosecutor, the judge and Paris school district administrators, would agree to speak about their handling of it, citing a court appeal under way. But the teen's defenders assert that long before the September 2005 shoving incident, Paris school officials targeted Shaquanda for scrutiny because her mother had frequently accused school officials of racism. Retaliation alleged "Shaquanda started getting written up a lot after her mother became involved in a protest march in front of a school," said Sharon Reynerson, an attorney with Lone Star Legal Aid, who has represented Shaquanda during challenges to several of the disciplinary citations she received. "Some of the write-ups weren't fair to her or accurate, so we felt like we had to challenge each one to get the whole story." Among the write-ups Shaquanda received, according to Reynerson, were citations for wearing a skirt that was an inch too short, pouring too much paint into a cup during an art class and defacing a desk that school officials later conceded bore no signs of damage. Shaquanda's mother, Creola Cotton, does not dispute that her daughter can behave impulsively and was sometimes guilty of tardiness or speaking out of turn at school--behaviors that she said were manifestations of Shaquanda's attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, for which the teen was taking prescription medication. Nor does Shaquanda herself deny that she pushed the hall monitor after the teacher's aide refused her permission to enter the school before the morning bell--although Shaquanda maintains that she was supposed to have been allowed to visit the school nurse to take her medication, and that the teacher's aide pushed her first. But Cherry alleges that Shaquanda's frequent disciplinary write-ups, and the insistence of school officials at her trial that she deserved prison rather than probation for the shoving incident, fits in a larger pattern of systemic discrimination against black students in the Paris Independent School District. In the past five years, black parents have filed at least a dozen discrimination complaints against the school district with the federal Education Department, asserting that their children, who constitute 40 percent of the district's nearly 4,000 students, were singled out for excessive discipline. An attorney for the school district, Dennis Eichelbaum, said the Education Department had determined all of the complaints to be unfounded. "The [department] has explained that the school district has not and does not discriminate, that the school district has been a leader and very progressive when it comes to race relations, and that there was no validity to the allegations made by the complainants," Eichelbaum said. Not so clear But the federal investigations of the school district are not so clear-cut, and they are not finished. In one 2004 finding, Education Department officials determined that black students at a Paris middle school were being written up for disciplinary infractions more than twice as often as white students--and eight times as often in one category, "class disruption." The Education Department asked the U.S. Justice Department to try to mediate disputes between black parents and the district, but school officials pulled out of the process last December before it was concluded. And in April 2006, the Education Department notified Paris school officials that it was opening a new, comprehensive review to determine "whether the district discriminated against African-American students on the basis of race" between 2004 and 2006. Federal officials say that investigation is still in progress. According to one veteran Paris teacher, who asked not to be named for fear of retribution, such discrimination is widespread. "There is a philosophy of giving white kids a break and coming down on black kids," said the teacher, who is white. Not everyone in Paris agrees, however, that blacks are treated unfairly by the city's institutions. "I've lived here all my life, and I don't see that," said Mary Ann Reed Fisher, one of two black members of the Paris City Council. "My kids went to Paris High School, and they never had one minute of a problem with the school system, the courts or the police." A peculiar inmate Meanwhile, Shaquanda, a first-time offender, remains something of an anomaly inside the Texas Youth Commission prison system, where officials say 95 percent of the 2,500 juveniles in their custody are chronic, serious offenders who already have exhausted county-level programs such as probation and local treatment or detention. "The Texas Youth Commission is reserved for those youth who are most violent or most habitual," said commission spokesman Tim Savoy. "The whole concept of commitment until your 21st birthday should be recognized as a severe penalty, and that's why it's typically the last resort of the juvenile system in Texas." Inside the youth prison in Brownwood where she has been incarcerated for the past 10 months--a prison currently at the center of a state scandal involving a guard who allegedly sexually abused teenage inmates--Shaquanda, who is now 15, says she has not been doing well. Three times she has tried to injure herself, first by scratching her face, then by cutting her arm. The last time, she said, she copied a method she saw another young inmate try, knotting a sweater around her neck and yanking it tight so she couldn't breathe. The guards noticed her sprawled inside her cell before it was too late. She tried to harm herself, Shaquanda said, out of depression, desperation and fear of the hardened young thieves, robbers, sex offenders and parole violators all around her whom she must try to avoid each day. "I get paranoid when I get around some of these girls," Shaquanda said. "Sometimes I feel like I just can't do this no more--that I can't survive this."
Poster Comment: the schools are very fascist. must prepare young Americans for the future.
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#1. To: All (#0)
here is photo of the young woman imprisoned for 7 years because she shoved a school NAZI who shoved her first when she just needed to get inside by prior agreement to take medicine.
Galatians 3:29 And if ye [be] Christ's, then are ye Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise.
what a dramatic demonstration of the simple fact that the government is an enemy of the American people. What drug did she have to take in the first place that she needed in? Likely ritalin or prozac, the governmnent was likely drugging her up. first thing in morning and needing medication - she may not have felt well, very grouchy. and no doubt the school NAZI did mis-treat her - they are so arrogant now. for this she spends 7 years in jail. But if we talk about how US government harms Americans, then we are 'anti-American'. the supporters of government must lie deceive & cheat to get their way, and that is exactly what they do.
Galatians 3:29 And if ye [be] Christ's, then are ye Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise.
Article 10 of New Hampshire's Bill of Rights: Move north if you want to fight this.
Press 1 to proceed in English. Press 2 for Deportation.
I'm fairly sure the sentence was indeterminate.
Letting loose with a scream in the dead of night; as he's breaking new ground; trying his best to unlock all the secrets but; he's not sure what he's found
There are no plaques or markers to denote it, but several of the most notorious public lynchings of black Americans in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries were staged at the Paris Fairgrounds, where thousands of white spectators would gather to watch and cheer as black men were dragged onto a scaffold, scalded with hot irons and finally burned to death or hanged. Blacks were not the sole targets of lynchings, and they were targeted roughly proportional to their crime rate. There are the Paris public schools, which are under investigation by the U.S. Education Department after repeated complaints that administrators discipline black students more frequently, and more harshly, than white students. There must still be too many whites in the schools. The Department will fix this. But Shaquanda was tried in March 2006 in the town's juvenile court, convicted of "assault on a public servant" and sentenced by Lamar County Judge Chuck Superville to prison for up to 7 years, until she turns 21. Just three months earlier, Superville sentenced a 14-year-old white girl, convicted of arson for burning down her family's house, to probation. Without any other information that indeed sounds odd. The white girl may have expressed contrition, for example. And it may well be that some blacks simply don't respond as well to punishment; harsher sentences may be in order.
Letting loose with a scream in the dead of night; as he's breaking new ground; trying his best to unlock all the secrets but; he's not sure what he's found
Jeez. This is SICK. I got into it one day with the hockey coach, who disliked my hair and called me a BAD name, but he hit me first, then I took him down and dragged him to the office. Even in my wacko school, they just dropped the issue and told him never to talk to me again. This kid gets sent to the slammer. Sick, sick, sick. Oh, wait, it's Texas. Normal, normal, normal.
Theoretically, your sentence for a crime in this country is not supposed to be decided by the color of your skin. You must know this.
Let's not call them "public schools", let's call them by their proper names, "Children's Indoctrination Centers". Understanding something comes easier when you call it by its proper name.
#2. To: All (#0)
#3. To: Red Jones, christine (#2)
the supporters of government must lie deceive & cheat to get their way, and that is exactly what they do.
Whenever the ends of government are perverted, and public liberty manifestly endangered, and all other means of redress are ineffectual, the people may, and of right ought to reform the old, or establish a new government. The doctrine of nonresistance against arbitrary power, and oppression, is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.
#4. To: Red Jones (#0)
#5. To: Red Jones (#0)
#6. To: Red Jones (#1)
school NAZI who shoved her first
#7. To: Tauzero (#5)
And it may well be that some blacks simply don't respond as well to punishment; harsher sentences may be in order.
#8. To: Red Jones (#0)
 | Gold and silver are real money, paper is but a promise. |
#9. To: Mekons4 (#6)
If you were in school today (especially in TX) and you assaulted that hockey coach who was giving you hard time like that, they'd probably put you in jail until you're 30!! But I surely concur that some of those authority figures in the schools did (and I presume do) mistreat the students by showing them disrespect, etc. When the goal is to impose fascism on people, then all kinds of abuse by authorities is tolerated and once tolerated essentially encouraged.
Galatians 3:29 And if ye [be] Christ's, then are ye Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise.
#10. To: Elliott Jackalope (#8)
I fully agree.
"Children's Indoctrination Centers"
Galatians 3:29 And if ye [be] Christ's, then are ye Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise.
#11. To: Tauzero (#5)
you carry your racism a little bit far. makes me think you do it to get attention. I'm sure that's a valid point that you said that there were non-black victims of lynchings too. It was in those days a form of law enforcement as we had a tradition in some parts of our country where the law did not work and the citizens had reason to take things in own hands. But OTOH the history of the lynchings against blacks in the south are such that many were racist motivated and very unjust.
And it may well be that some blacks simply don't respond as well to punishment; harsher sentences may be in order.
Galatians 3:29 And if ye [be] Christ's, then are ye Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise.
#12. To: Mekons4 (#7)
Yes, and I certainly wouldn't want a racial distinction enshrined in law. Disparate impact suffices.
Theoretically, your sentence for a crime in this country is not supposed to be decided by the color of your skin.
Letting loose with a scream in the dead of night; as he's breaking new ground; trying his best to unlock all the secrets but; he's not sure what he's found
#13. To: Red Jones (#11)
All that is necessary is for whites to treat blacks as they would whites; harsher sentences will naturally follow, on average.
Letting loose with a scream in the dead of night; as he's breaking new ground; trying his best to unlock all the secrets but; he's not sure what he's found
#14. To: Red Jones (#11)
Seven years??? There's just a steady drumbeat of bad news these days. One sordid injustice after another. I'm beginning to succumb to the notion that this nation is beyond redemption.
ss . . ssanibsurdansinuoashin - Geo. W. Bush
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