6 months in prison folowed by 12 months supervised release, too harsh?

musicprnt
Sat, 19 Sep 2015 20:12:48 +0000

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.