Louisiana Supreme Court Decides a Black Man Should Stay in Prison for the Rest of His Life...

[Nevilledog]

Louisiana Supreme Court Decides a Black Man Should Stay in Prison for the Rest of His Life for Stealing Hedge Clippers

https://www.theroot.com/louisiana-supreme-court-decides-a-black-man-should-stay-1844619588

There has been plenty of discussion about whether prison is more about rehabilitation, punishment or keeping society safe. However, for Black people especially, it often seems like there’s a fourth option: Prison is about throwing undesirable people away.

More than 20 years ago, a Black man was given a life sentence for stealing a pair of hedge clippers. Last week, the Louisiana Supreme Court denied that man a request to have his sentence reviewed citing prior bad acts, most of which were nonviolent. Only one of the seven justices on the bench agreed that his sentence should be reviewed—the Black one.

The Washington Post reports that Fair Wayne Bryant was 38 years old when he was arrested in Shreveport, La., and has now spent nearly 23 years at Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, which happens to be America’s largest maximum-security prison and one that sits on land that used to be home to a slave plantation.

Chief Justice Bernette Johnson was the lone voice of dissent, the only African American justice and, apparently, the only one among her colleagues able to see systemic racism working in real-time.

*snip*

[BKDem]

1. Life for the Black man. Not a day for Roger Stone.

I wonder what the hedge clippers cost back in 1997? I doubt it was Grand Theft.

[Jarqui]

2. When is this going to stop?

Enough!!

Meanwhile, the President's negligence killing thousands of Americans can carry on unfettered ...

[Tech]

3. I was appalled by this.

[Bev54]

4. Isn't the governor a democrat?

Time for him to commute this sentence.

[Johnny2X2X]

5. Disgusting

Life in prison for hedge clippers, I don't care what other crimes he's had, that's just insane and should not be happening in America.

The sequence of events that led up to this are surely a lesson in racism. 4th felony was because racist prosecutors threw the book at him every time.

[maxsolomon]

6. 3 Strikes conviction?

the link has a lot of the article blocked out.

Cruel and Unusual punishment. Appeal to the SCOTUS.

[Celerity]

7. Pig Laws, 2020 version

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/08/05/louisiana-supreme-court-life-sentence/

In her dissent, Johnson — the court’s first Black chief justice — drew a straight line from slavery to the laws that she said enabled Louisiana prosecutors to send Bryant to Angola for the rest of his life.

In the years following Reconstruction, she wrote, Southern states introduced extreme sentences for petty theft, such as stealing cattle and swine, that criminalized recently freed African Americans who were still struggling to come out of poverty.

Much like Black Codes before them, they allowed states to sentence people to forced labor. Under these laws, the Black prison population in the Deep South exploded starting in the 1870s.

“Pig Laws were largely designed to re-enslave African Americans,” Johnson wrote.

Those same laws, she argued, evolved into Louisiana’s habitual offender laws, which allows prosecutors to seek harsher sentences for lesser crimes if a defendant has previous convictions.

Those laws have drawn heavy scrutiny for allowing excessively harsh sentences and driving mass incarceration. Almost 80 percent of people incarcerated in Louisiana prisons under the habitual offender laws are Black, the Lens reported.