He said, “taint”.

We have a couple of issues here.

a) What does having a change of venue have to do with Michelle Malkin? Did she move to Knoxville and I missed it?

If so, if the complaint about a change of view is “bloggers”, what jurisdiction in America do you suppose is “blogger free” enough to hold a trial for this particular piece of shit?

There’s no “suggestion” Christian and Newsom were gangraped. The 5 offenders are charged with close to 46 counts a piece which alone suggests they did more than just rubbed their victims’ legs inappropriately.

The “fact vs. fiction” in this case has been less than proven and we won’t know until they start presenting their case.

You want to tell me that if five white kids abduct a young black couple and sodomize and murder them and dump their bodies that we wouldn’t be seeing another fake Jena 6 protest blow up?

Oh yea, they only wanted them for their Escalade that’s why he poured Drano-O down her throat.

Well, I think it’s obvious that the defendants are evil and f*cked in the head. I think it remains to be seen whether they picked these particular victims because they were white or just because they were convenient. Either way, who thinks they should ever see a day of freedom again in their, hopefully, short lives?

As for whether there would be a protest, I don’t think that’s as clear-cut as you insinuate. After all, no one’s traveled to West Viginia to protest the Brewster gang yet.

Brian, I haven’t been following this case closely, but in answer to “a” - I think it’s exactly what you suggest in your next paragraph - where *aren’t* bloggers, and if nationally known folks like Malkin are talking about it, what good is moving the trial?

The defense attorneys are going to be throwing the entire Spaghetti Pot of Excuses at the wall in this case because everyone of their clients should be staring down the death penalty.

They’ll ask to change the venue. They will try to exclude anyone from the jury pool who is pro-death penalty and will ask racially charged voir dire questions. That’s their job.

The blogger excuse is just a new one on me. A funny one considering bloggers don’t have the type of audience that radio and tv has.

The argument would be that, outside of Knoxville, the national media put the pillow over this baby’s face early on because it didn’t fit the narrative so blogs brought the crime to people’s attention. However, blogs have no geographic boundaries so it’s a specious and open-ended attempt by the defense to render any jurisdiction incapable of holding a fair trial.

Knoxville is a very confused town. We have several high profile murder trials coming up. You should see some of what the daily paper prints. Hearsay of the highest factor.

Today’s hearsay is very favorable to a leading attorney in Knoxville Greg Isaacs in the Johnia Berry murder case. And very troubling.

http://knoxnews.com/news/2007/nov/17/tip-broadens-berry-case/#comments

The Knox County DA seems to be paralysed by either politics or incompetence. The News Sentinel loves controversy. And bloggers try to find the truth. Yet ironically it is the bloggers that are used as an example of what is wrong.

I don’t know in this environment how you can try a case in Knoxville. But it is not the bloggers that are the problem. The DA puts cases off for so long, some for over a year, while the News Sentinel grinds the story with each and every possible conspiracy and innuendo to sell papers.

Something is very wrong in Knoxville. But it isn’t bloggers.

Hopefully they move it to Nashville and I get picked for the jury.

Clever defense attorneys will go to great lengths to get their clients as good a venue as possible.

This ploy tells me there’s not much else to find to work with. Play the race card, play the blogger card, maybe fly in Jesse Jackson and Gleen Greenwald for expert witnesses?

I’ve not followed this case up until now. I sort of like to wait until the verdict is reached…and I like to remember that there’s only 12 opinions that count.

I guess a question is how regularly do people in Knoxville read racist and white supremacist sites, where most of the inflammatory material has appeared.

And if they do, are they more likely to do so than other people in Tennessee or the South or anywhere?

I like to think they neither regularly read such sites nor are more likely to do so than people in other areas. Certainly there are people to whom the hate message of these fringe groups resonates.

It was unfortunate to see people like country music musician Charlie Daniels pick up on at least the “no national media coverage” theme that was pressed by the hate sites and carried forth by other more mainstream converstative commentators as one more piece of evidence of Liberal Media bias.

It makes you wonder if there is just a very thin veneer of political correctness in race relations.

A change of venue is a pretty common request for a high profile, emotionally charged case; the only unusual thing about this one is that the blogger activity was highlighted.

The lawyer’s argument is fatuous, since everything he adduces about the worldwide spread of (mis)information on the Web goes to show that moving the trial would NOT make a difference. But his oath requires that he try as hard as he can to defend his client (whom I’m sure he’d rather not have). If he didn’t, the guy would get off on an appeal, and there would then be no way to get him.

The facts disclosed so far do not support a “hate crime” theory. Insofar as there’s doubt about that, it just shows what an intellectual muddle the idea of “hate crimes” is. I agree with the Knoxville blogger, though, that if the races in the case were reversed, media attention would have extended further. Furthermore, had the races been reversed, authorities would have put more energy into investigating the question whether a hate crime occurred–in this case it probably was never considered a question apt for police investigation.

Black men gang raping a white man is a prison norm (whether out of “hate” or because whites don’t form protective alliances in prison as other groups do is uncertain). At least one of the accused had done serious time for a violent crime already and presumably would have learned this as a norm, and maybe even developed a taste for it. For this reason it’s plausible that Christopher would not have been raped, had he not been white. Even this, however, would not make it a “hate crime.” It would just make it a crime more likely to happen to white men than to others.

The worst thing about the muddle of “hate crime” nonsense in this case is that it distracts attention from the important issue, which I have not seen discussed by anyone: why someone who had already committed a violent carjacking was on the streets again a few years later, when there could not have been reason to think he was reformed or expect anything but more violence from him. The larger issue is that the prisons are too full of drug dealers to accommodate the real threats to society. All of this outrage is misdirected. People need to be thinking, not about which kind of hate went into these crimes, but about how a more rational criminal justice system would have prevented them by keeping someone already known to be a brutal ape in prison for life, instead of just long enough to make him worse.

sw - I’m long winded enough so I edited out my bit on hate crime laws though I agree.

Having said that, let’s be clear - the benefit of the doubt is being given to Christian/Newsom’s five attackers more than would be given to you for that “brutal ape” comment at the end.

Punish the crime - not the thought.

There was quite a bit of misinformation in this case, but it originated almost entirely from the police and the media, not bloggers. From the May 27, 2007 Knoxville News-Sentinel:

————————

The first major dose of misinformation in the killings came from a deputy U.S. marshal in Kentucky, where three of the five suspects were arrested.

He insisted Christian was held captive and repeatedly gang-raped for four days before her body was found inside a garbage can in one of the suspect’s Chipman Street rental house.

Mainstream media reported the marshal’s statements for at least two days. The stories and broadcasts were posted on the Internet and sent out over The Associated Press’ news service.

As it turned out, Christian, though repeatedly raped, was dead within 24 hours of her abduction.

Some media corrected the earlier accounts in follow-up stories. But the claim kept surfacing — and it remains out there today on the Internet and even among traditional outside media.

That was just the beginning of misstatements about the crimes, although the source or sources behind later falsehoods is largely unknown. Those misstatements included claims that Newsom and Christian were sexually mutilated.

They weren’t, authorities say.

There also have been persistent claims that Christian was dismembered. As late as last week, a local television station on its Web site reported that Christian’s body had been dismembered and found in “five trash bags.” The fact is, Christian’s intact body was wrapped in five trash bags.

————————

I based that epithet on his prior conviction for a violent crime–something already proven–not the present accusations (or the mugshot). If “brutal ape” doesn’t fit someone who yanks a terrified person out of his or her car at gunpoint, then I don’t speak English.

I get your point, though–I just don’t censor my speech for our eggshell terrain and climate of doublespeak. Thankfully I’m a nobody who doesn’t have to. (Besides, you would need to know what color my skin is, to know how much indulgence my speech would meet with, if anyone heard it.)

My comment went into the moderation queue and I don’t know when or if it will come out. In a nutshell, there was quite a bit of misinformation in this case, but it originated almost entirely from the police and the media, not bloggers. See this article at the Knoxville News-Sentinel:

http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2007/may/27/slaying-victims-lost-in-the-furor/

You’re preaching to the converted here, Rev. Davis. Political correctness is what keeps everyone from having a substantive discussion on any issue of the day. Which is its point.

As a result, I eschew PC jargon which explains my runaway popularity.

Well said–and in some ages and places, popularity is a badge of vice.

Besides political correctness, the facts in this case tend to confuse and emotionalize discussion of it. A despairing, overwhelming urge to keep it from happening arises in the heart, while the mind knows that we can only act on the future. Our horror can only be dealt with through punishment; so we want whoever did it to be punished in every conceivable way–because every punishment falls short. (Even death falls short, because the death of a bad person is nothing beside the death of a good person.) The debate about “hate” is in part the product of this futile moral impulse to heap on enough punishment. I hope we can redirect at least some of that energy further into the past, to understand why these things happened, and further into the future, to prevent similar atrocities. That is all we can do about the victims’ and their loved ones’ suffering — transform its mind-boggling evil into something with meaning, a cause of greater safety and peace. In the meantime, gird your loins with strength, and strengthen your arms (Proverbs 31:17) — at least a .38.

If my loins get girded any more they are going to have to move this trial out of the country.