For the man who helped put a noose on the statue.
Wouldn’t community service have done the job?
It seems like vandalism unless you consider the history of the noose and it’s use on black people in the south. I don’t think the sentence is inappropriate.
Note the charge was using a threat of force to intimidate people targeted for their race/ethnicity. So yes, the crime is serious enough to warrant jail time.
I have never heard of anyone going to prison for something like this. There was no damage to the statue. No one was specifically targeted. I wonder what Professor Volokh has to say. He’s my go-to guy for legal issues like this.
It’s a terroristic act. I think it’s appropriate.
http://www.mindingthecampus.org/2014/03/ole_miss_seeks_to_put_first_am/
Another civil liberties lawyer weighed in. There was no specific threat to any individual. He thinks it should be protected under the First Amendment.
It is after all easy to protect speech with which one agrees. But the First Amendment is primarily needed to protect speech with which one disagrees and which a government entity seeks to criminalize.
(Most likely this was not a political statement at all, but a prank that they stupidly thought was funny).
The charge is not vandalism so the harm examined is not to the statue. The threat is the crime and the harm is the fear caused in black students and employees of the school. The sentence is saying “congratulations, your act of intimidation is effective,” but you don’t have the right go around intimidating people.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/geoffrey-r-stone/the-noose-ole-miss-and-fr_b_4820588.html
A law professor from the University of Chicago weighs in. He thinks it is protected free speech. The Supreme Court discussed the difference between speech and a threat in a cross burning case. If the cross is burned on someone’s lawn, it is a threat. If it is burned at a Klan rally it is free speech because no one specifically was targeted.
Let’s save prison for people who are guilty of actual violence against people. Let’s give other convicts something constructive to do.
I doubt if anyone who has vandalized a statue with spray paint is doing prison time right now. Isn’t it most likely a fine or restitution to repair the damage?
“The Supreme Court discussed the difference between speech and a threat in a cross burning case. If the cross is burned on someone’s lawn, it is a threat. If it is burned at a Klan rally it is free speech because no one specifically was targeted.”
Using this reasoning… This was a threat, because it was a message directed to “a specific group of individuals” - the group limited to black students attending Ole Miss and their professors and staff. It also took place not as a part of an organized rally or some sort of assembly; it happened on campus of a university these students call their “home” for several years.
Let the kid and his legal team appeal and file a suit claiming violation of this kid’s First Amendment rights. I’d be curious to see how that suit evolves.
The reason they sentenced the person to jail was because of the history of the noose, especially down in a place like Mississippi where lynching was common. The Supreme Court case involving cross burning would imply that in this case, because it was not targeted at a specific person or group of people, it was a free speech issue (even though I suspect, as others did, that this was some drunken idiot thinking it was funny to put a noose on the statue in question, kind of like putting a silly hat on it or something in his mind). Interestingly, when that case was decided, Clarence Thomas wrote a dissent where he argued that burning a cross at a klan rally was meant to intimidate, because historically the clan would burn a cross at a rally, indicating they were on the warpath, and then would go wreak havoc, so there was reason to say it was not protected, that it was meant to intimidate and harass (I learned the origin of Cross burning not long ago, it stems from a tradition of Scottish clans, that when they went to war against another clan they would burn a cross to signify being in this state, there is a scene like that in Diana Gabaldon’s “Outlander” series, where that happens at a gathering of clans. Given the ancestry of the people where the Klan was formed, they took that old tradition…
Personally I suspect in this case the guy wasn’t guilty of harassment, I doubt he even thought about it, and given the intent, I would argue he deserved maybe community service.However, I don’t agree with Wasatch, there are times and places (not here) where someone does deserve jail time even if it didn’t involve ’ actual violence’…things like burning crosses on someone’s lawn, sending death threats, a neighbor screaming at the top of his lungs that he’ll kill the next door neighbor, are not about speech, they are about intimidation and harassment and that threat of violence hurts people, it is designed to scare them, it is no different than getting in someone’s face and showing them your first, it is not protected speech. The reason the judge probably did the sentence he did was to send a message, that acts of intimidation and harassment won’t be tolerated. I doubt it was warranted in this case, like I said community service would do it, but for real acts of intimidation and harassment, like burning a cross on someone’s law, I think they should send them to jail, the idea of sticks and stones may break my bones but words won’t hurt me doesn’t apply in that case, if someone’s intent is to intimidate people, threaten them, they deserve to be put away, because that is a kind of violence, too.
I think the student should appeal this as well. Virginia v. Black (the cross burning case) requires a specific intent to intimidate someone, which is questionable here. If it was a drunken prank then intent to intimidate is questionable.
I abhor his action but I think that too many non-violent offenders are incarcerated in our country already. A weekend in jail–not prison–followed by probation and community service would have been plenty.
I’m kinda of this opinion also. I think as a nation we’re just getting pretty far outside the entire reason why we put people in jails…because they are a very real threat to SOCIETY. I’m think what the kid did was in poor taste but I do not think that lodging someone in jail for being boorish is what we should be focusing out attention on.
So now this guy will be hard to employ because he has a prison record. For the good of society I wish we would think about what we would like the outcome to be instead of always thinking about what is “fair” or what is punishment.
We punish ourselves when we make all these people ex-convicts
He is 20 years old, with no former record.
Some serious Community Service - maybe in and to the black community - would be more appropriate. He should not go to jail or prison for this.
Twenty year olds are not known for their fantastic judgment. It was stupid and awful but he should hear that from people whom it affected, not just be thrown in jail and likely attacked, and his life ruined because of this incident at age 20.
I agree that, sadly, throwing this kid in jail is not going to rehabilitate him and cure his racist mind. Neither would community service, but it would be a better, more useful to the society option. Punishment is not the only reason some criminals get jail time - occasionally, judges hand these “cruel” sentences to send a message, to get appeals going, and maybe to get an opinion of an upper court (not saying this is what was going on in this specific judge’s mind). If the kid got 6 mos of sweeping bus stops, do you think the media would have picked up this story? Personally, I’d like to see this end up in the Supreme Court’s hands resulting an opinion that this kind of behavior is not “free speech.”
According to the article, he has a misdemeanor, not a felony.
This sounds like a get kicked out of school, get 100 hours of community service kind of crime to me. Obviously what he did isn’t good, but prison time is inappropriate in my opinion. And when I say that I’m saying it with the belief that he was intending to intimidate the collective black students at the university. As far as I can tell, he admitted that he intended to do that.
He plead to it, which should mean if I understand correctly that he allocuted to the crime he was charged with, meaning he admitted to intending to intimidate someone. Can that be appealed?
Okay, I just read the details of the case and there were some things I didn’t realize. The statue in question was not of some founder of the school or some pompous figure, it was a statue of James Meredith, who was one of the black students who faced mobs of white protesters, many of whom threatened his life, to attend the school in 1962, and the person in question pled guilty to intending to intimidate blacks with his action. The fact that the statue was of James Meredith changes the tone, since he like any black faced the threat of lynching for real at the time, and putting that noose on his neck was not just a stupid prank.
Does he deserve time in jail for it? That comes down to the terms of the law and also his intent. It sounds like the judge felt that the person’s intent was not just a stupid prank, but he did it with the idea of intimidating blacks on campus, and felt that the nature of the crime deserved time in jail. If he had done this as a drunken frat prank, if it was a statue of BJ Moneysworth, who used his ill gotten gains from land swindles to make the library (and that is not a real person, folks), then he wouldn’t have gotten this. And yes, this will haunt the guy, but that happens in our society, people get sent to jail for all kinds of idiotic things, like underage possession of alcohol, they get sent to jail for having a joint, they get sent to jail for a lot of things they probably shouldn’t. If the judge felt that the kid and his co-defendant were hard core white supremacists, for example, then the sentence is there to send a lesson that such things will not be tolerated. I have little sympathy for these two, this was not an innocent prank, and in the end, they screwed up their own lives, they may be 20,and ignorant jerks whose fathers belong to the KKK for all I know, but they did a deliberate act of hate, pure and simple so whether fair or not, they screwed themselves.