Pamela Colloff, in The Texas Monthly, reports that “On a Saturday night three years ago, a mentally disabled black man from Linden [Texas] was taken to a party filled with white kids half his age. A few hours later, he was dumped by the side of the road, bleeding and unconscious. But of all the crimes that were committed, none was worse than how the small East Texas town responded—and who were considered the victims.”
Due to half-hearted prosecutions and pervasive bigotry the justice system failed, as the perpetrators were convicted of only minor offenses. In the face of the injustice, Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center (one of the world’s true heroes, I think) has filed a “wrongful-injury lawsuit” against the perpetrators.
It is a sad and outrageous story.
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April 22, 2007 at 8:02 pm
[...] of Hate Crime Made to Pay Dearly Jump to Comments I posted a link in late February to a story by Pamela Colloff, in The Texas Monthly about the beating of Billy Ray Johnson, a [...]