I cut a video to get the entire blurt out of my system, but I suspect this thing isn't over. Still, it pretty much sums up everything I've bothered to think about this.
There's really nothing new in this that I haven't said or implied except for two or three things.
#1. The 58 year old is ethically responsible for what happened to Cotton. I've been speaking about her broadly as part of the school, but something tells me that there was a discussion between her and some other folks about what charges would be brought against Cotton. The fault lies broadly with the community for washing their hands of her and letting her get into the system, but as the victim, it is her desire for justice that may have been overzealous or politically motivated. I have a choice of victims to blame, I blame the ones I think should be most responsible.
#2. Who's jumping on board the political case? Anyone in the Texas Legislature? Has the DOJ assigned some US Attorney, or have they been fired too? What's the venue?
#3. Who's jumping on board the appellate case? Where's Barry Scheck? Who's putting forth money for a legal defense fund? It's far too easy to say that 'Superville is racist' and just leave it at that. Some heavyweight is going to have prove it and smack him down on appeal. The governor should pardon her.
There are a couple things I neglected to say which I should have re-emphasized in the video.
#1. The cases for the Coalition of the Damned were Tookie Williams, Stanley Miller and Devin Brown. You could add Mumia Abu Jamal, MOVE and Seas of David to that list, and peripherally various victims of obvious police abuse, like Amadou Diallo & Rodney King.
#2. There exists the possibility that Cotton's insistence on innocence implies a tacit rejection of any offer of probation. This could be linked to the federal case, or just an insistence on a jury vindication.
There are some mistakes and omissions:
The Coalition of the Damned is a subset of the Progressives and Liberal black politics. I don't mean to imply that Progressives and Liberals are fundamentally anti-cop, and anti-System. Nor do I mean to imply that Liberals and Progressives are wrong to join with the Coalition when the System needs reform.
Finally there are things I don't feel comfortable saying on video that I prefer to write about.
That fundamentally is around issues like the situational ethics of living in a relatively racist, impoverished or dangerous area. On the one hand you can't blame people for living in Paris Texas, and of course everyone has to take a stand for justice wherever they live. But African Americans live in other states besides former slave states for good reasons. I wrote similarly about Katrina in the pieces What's Broke Stays Broke and Derbigny. My general attitude is rather harsh on the matter, only because I try not to second guess people. So I only assume that when bad things happen to people and they blame the environment, it's not as if the environment snuck up on them while they weren't looking.
Other than that, I expect that the video makes it clear, if my writing does not, that I consider this a failure and a tragedy, that I am perfectly willing to believe that Shaquanda is as good as people make her out to be and that even if she wasn't that the school and community should have handled her and protected her to the best of its ability. I hope it also makes it clear that I expect prosecutors to prosecute and judges to judge and that when 370K defendants get into the System, I expect the System to do what it does.
Additionally, to the extent that there are some who will consider this moment of inflection the 'birth of the blackosphere'... well I'm rather of the same sadness I expressed over the exploitation of Devin Brown's dead body. I still insist that it is just plain wrong to make political symbols of children whether that child be Megan Kanka or that murdered kid in Colorado. It's shameful.
That's pretty much all I have to say on the matter, for now.
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