Posted on

the-movemnt:

The Equal Justice Initiative is building a memorial for lynching victims — and it’s about time.

The Equal Justice Initiative announced on Tuesday that it will build the first-ever national memorial to lynching victims in Montgomery, Alabama. Titled “Memorial to Peace and Justice,” the EJI project will sit on six acres of land that used to be a public housing project in Montgomery. 

The structure will include the thousands of lynching victims’ names on concrete columns, which will represent hundreds of U.S. counties where the acts took place. The memorial will also coincide with the opening of a museum.

follow @the-movemnt

Posted on

jacatlyn:

A WHITE HIGH SCHOOL FOOTBALL STAR VIOLENTLY RAPED A GIRL, FILMED IT, AND PUT IT ONLINE BUT HE SHOULDN’T GET PUNISHED.

A BLACK KID CARRYING SKITTLES GETS SHOT AND WAS A THUG.

A WHITE KID SHOOTS UP A UNIVERSITY BUT HE WAS SUCH A GOOD KID.

AN UNARMED BLACK KID GETS SHOT 6 TIMES AND DESERVED TO DIE.

A WHITE GUY RAPES HIS THREE YEAR OLD DAUGHTER, BUT DOESN’T GO TO PRISON.

A BLACK KID WITH A BB GUN IS SHOT AND KILLED ON SITE.

Something is wrong.

Posted on

Media Coverage Attacks 16-Year-Old African American Rape and Murder Victim For ‘Troubled Past’

fuckyeahcracker:

blackingzz:

image

Strangely enough, in the Dayton, Ohio area, we haven’t heard a lot about the case of two Franklin men who recently beat an African American teen to death. Don’t get me wrong, they’ve talked about it on the news, but it has received disproportionately little coverage compared to many other issues. To make matters worse, when the local news has covered this story, they have tended to implicitly blame the victim – 16-year-old Dione Payne – who was raped, and beaten to death by Michael A. Geldrich, 36, and Michael J. Watson, 39.

The men have been arrested, arraigned and charged with aggravated robbery and murder. They are currently in the Warren County Jail.
In a sworn affidavit signed Monday by Franklin Detective Jeff Stewart we are told that “During the robbery Geldrich struck the male victim (later identified as Payne) with a table leg, fists, stomped the male with his boots and repeatedly struck the male victim’s head against the floor.”
The two rapists then dumped Payne’s nearly dead body off around 10:30 a.m. in the emergency room at Atrium Medical Center in Middletown, not far from where they lived. The two seemed worried that they had “over done it” and knew that they would likely face an investigation if Payne were to die. They were right.
The hospital reported that upon arrival he was in critical condition and had “heavy damage to his head and was bleeding from his ears,” according to the police. Payne also had “heavy damage done to his chest from what appeared to be someone striking him repeatedly.”
The injuries were too severe for the small Middletown hospital to handle, so he was promptly transferred to Miami Valley Hospital in Dayton. Upon further examination, the MVH workers discovered that Payne had been sexually assaulted. Hospital personnel there contacted Middletown police and stated the teen appeared to have been sexually assaulted, according to the police report.
Payne’s mother Tamiko Payne told a family friend Donna Parson that the family considers this a premeditated act, and thus want both men to receive the death penalty.
“This is what they deserve. Death. This was a 16-year-old boy (beaten) by two full-grown men,” she explained.
Meanwhile, Local Dayton Daily News seemed most interested in emphasizing two things throughout their reporting, in the article, ‘Dayton teen beaten to death had troubled past’:
1. That the 16-year-old rape and murder victim had a “troubled past”, bringing up narcotics possession and sales on the youth’s juvenile record. They emphasize that he was just released October 22 from the custody of the Ohio Department of Youth Services. They even note that he was arrested for littering recently. Why such a hyper-fixation on his juvenile record? Isn’t this a case, a story and a tragedy about assault, rape and murder? Why should the local media focus so much on what thevictim has done in his past?
2. That Franklin Police Chief Russ Whitman emphasized that “there is no evidence whatsoever” the rape, beating and murder of Payne was racially motivated. Perhaps they suspect that this was the first time the two men had ever purchased drugs, or maybe that they had raped, beaten and murdered other people they had bought drugs for.
According to Dayton Police reports, that incident involved him firing five shots at his mother’s boyfriend after an argument at the family’s home in October of 2012. Payne was arrested on a warrant several weeks later when he was stopped for littering in the DeSoto Bass neighborhood several blocks from his house. He was transported to juvenile detention where a small amount of cocaine was found in his pocket, according to the report.
The police offer no evidence nor even propose a motive for this attack and murder. Why? And more importantly, why is the local Dayton media trying to highlight statements that would exonerate the rapists and murderers from hate crime charges, while simultaneously focusing on the low points in the youth’s life that in no way justify nor caused his physical and sexual assault, as well as murder?
Throughout the Dayton area, the African American community is saying they are not surprised. Dayton has a long history of slanted, anti-African American reporting such as this, where the victim is first and foremost blamed for whatever happens to them.
“All evidence points to the crime being drug-related,” Dayton Daily News emphasized Chief Whitman’s statement. “Any suggestion that this is a ‘hate crime’ or racially motivated is not based upon actual evidence.”
Strange, since so incidences like this are relatively unheard of in the area, regardless of whether drug sales are involved or not. Why are the police so quick to dismiss a motive of racism, and perhaps just as importantly, why is the local media asleep at the wheel?
(Article by Micah Naziri; image via PBSpot)

This is deplorable.

Posted on

mamamantis:

Battered women morally entitled to kill abusers, U of O professor asserts

sixtyforty:

OTTAWA — Battered women are morally entitled to kill their abusive partners, even those who are passed out or asleep, says a respected University of Ottawa law professor.

Elizabeth Sheehy raises the provocative idea in her new book, eight years in the making, called Defending Battered Women on Trial. It will be published Dec. 15 by UBC Press.

“Why should women live in anticipatory dread and hypervigilence?” she writes in the book’s concluding chapter. Would it not be just, Sheehy asks, “to shift the risk of death to those men whose aggressions have created such dehumanizing fear in their female partners?”

In an interview with the Citizen, Sheehy — who received a prestigious award from the Canadian Bar Association for her scholarship on women and the law this summer — answered that question in the affirmative.

Battered women can justly kill abusive partners “because a woman in that circumstance has already lived in captivity,” she said. “She’s already lived in a form of imprisonment and enslavement in a relationship like that.”

Sheehy likened women in abusive relationships to prisoners of war. “We would never say of a prisoner of war that it’s not just that she or he kill their captor to escape. It is just to kill to escape that kind of enslavement.”

While the legal system sometimes excuses battered women who kill abusive partners by accepting a verdict of manslaughter on compassionate grounds, that does not go far enough, Sheehy argues. “We should say you were right to kill to save your own life.”

Sheehy’s book, which is written for a general audience, is built around the trials of 11 battered women, 10 of whom killed their partners. She draws heavily on trial transcripts to examine the evidence and the legal strategies of the defence lawyers.

To select those 11 trials, Sheehy studied 91 cases of battered women who killed their partners between 1990, when the Supreme Court of Canada recognized “battered women syndrome” as a legal defence, and 2005. In all of those cases, she writes, self-defence was at least arguable.

Sixty-two were ultimately convicted of some form of homicide — 49 pleaded guilty to manslaughter — and the other 29 were either acquitted or spared a trial.

Sheehy was pleasantly surprised by the higher-than-expected number who were either acquitted or had charges dropped. But she said it was “disappointing and worrisome” to see how many women had pleaded guilty.

One reason is the mandatory life sentence for murder, with no parole eligibility for 25 years for first degree murder and 10 years for second degree murder, said Sheehy. Mandatory minimums are a “huge, huge barrier” to justice for battered women who kill their abusers, she said.

In particular, they are “an incredible threat” for women with children. “It puts them in the position of having to plead guilty (to manslaughter) to avoid the spectre of such a terrible sentence,” she said, even though many have some basis for arguing self-defence.

To remedy that, Sheehy argues there should be a “statutory escape hatch” that allows battered women charged with murder to escape mandatory minimum sentences.

Moreover, prosecutors should charge battered women who kill their abusers with manslaughter rather than murder, she said, to give them a chance to argue self-defence “without bearing the onerous consequences of failure.”

Charging battered women with murder is “so arbitrary when you know that there’s no other way that a woman can spontaneously defend her life,” Sheehy said.

“Men can kill women with their bare hands, and they do. Women almost never kill men that way. They can’t,” she said.

While very few women kill abusive men who are asleep or passed out, it’s “unfair” to charge them with first degree murder, Sheehy argues. “It’s not fair to characterize it as the most heinous form of murder, because it may be their own route to survival.”

Battered women’s “moral courage,” Sheehy writes in her book, “deserves our respect.

“When women kill to save their own lives, they assert that they matter, that their lives count — even more than the lives of their abusers.”

After all their abusers have done to them, “they have somehow taken a stand for their own humanity and saved themselves,” she writes. “And for this we should also be grateful.”