PrairiePundit

AP /CBS: The family of Justin Barker, the victim in the "Jena Six" racial beating case in Louisiana, has filed a civil lawsuit against the local school board, the parents of the six young men accused of beating him and the adult members among the six. The lawsuit was filed Nov. 29 in state district court, the Alexandria Daily Town Talk newspaper reported. The case and its racial overtones, sparked by the hanging on campus of nooses, a traditional symbol of lynch mobs, have attracted the attention of U.S. civil rights leaders, who led a large protest and said the original charges against the Jena Six were too strict. David and Kelli Barker and their son allege that seven Jena High School students attacked Justin on Dec. 4, 2006, as he walked out of the school's gym. The suit names the attackers as Mychal Bell, Jesse Beard, Theo Shaw, Bryant Purvis, Carwin Jones and Robert Bailey Jr., as well as a seventh student who has not been officially named by law enforcement as a par...

Michelle Malkin: Quoted material removed. You may read the original at the link above. Add the Jena case to the Duke non rape case and the Twany Brawley hoax that first raised Sharpton's "stature" in the "civil rights" community. It fits. The purported victim in all three were really the perps. In Jena the only hate crime committed was by the guys now being showered with cash for getting away will a vicious assault on an innocent white boy who was attacked from behind and knocked unconscious. That Sharpton once to use this unconscionable act to promote a "Hate Crime" statue tells you a lot about him and his causes.

Craig Franklin debunks the Jena 6 myths that sprang from lazy journalism. Some of the best reporting on this story has been done by a black sports reporter for the Kansas City Star. Most of the worst has been done by those who use Al Sharpton as a source. Why they think he may be reliable after his experience with two phony "rape" cases cannot be ascribed to experience or good judgment.

Clarence Page: Nooses are in the news lately. I'm relieved that no one has been found hanging from any of them. All that any lamebrain has to do in order to make news, it seems, is to tie a rope into a noose and hang the knotty symbol of segregation-era lynchings in a conspicuous place. A news database search of "noose" quickly turned up one found recently at a Long Island police station locker room, another in a tree on the University of Maryland campus and another in a black Coast Guard cadet's bag aboard a cutter. A noose found on the office door of a black professor at Columbia University in New York led to a student-led antiracism rally, which national news cameras dutifully covered. ... "This is the first time something like this has happened for our generation," a University of Louisiana senior told the New York Times in Jena. "You always heard about it from history books and relatives. This is a chance to experience it for ourselves." ...

Reed Walters: ... I am a small-town lawyer and prosecutor. For 16 years, it has been my job as the district attorney to review each criminal case brought to me by the police department or the sheriff, match the facts to any applicable laws and seek justice for those who have been harmed. The work is often rewarding, but not always. ... I cannot overemphasize how abhorrent and stupid I find the placing of the nooses on the schoolyard tree in late August 2006. If those who committed that act considered it a prank, their sense of humor is seriously distorted. It was mean-spirited and deserves the condemnation of all decent people. But it broke no law. I searched the Louisiana criminal code for a crime that I could prosecute. There is none. Similarly, the United States attorney for the Western District of Louisiana, who is African-American, found no federal law against what was done. ... The victim in this crime, who has been all but forgotten amid the focus on the defendants, was a young ...

Thomas Sowell: It is painful -- and dangerous -- how little we learn from history, even when it is recent history. Just a year ago, "rape" charges spread lynch-mob hysteria on the campus of Duke University and in much of the liberal media, while professional race hustlers descended on the town of Durham, North Carolina, and mindless tribalism was stirred up by extremists in the local black community. This year, we have all learned what a total fraud that case was, from beginning to end. Yet now we see a similar outburst of mindless tribalism and another attempt at mob rule, promoted by such veterans of last year's hysteria as Jesse Jackson. This time the scene is in Jena, Louisiana. The issue is the prosecution of a black high school student accused of stomping on an unconscious white student -- and the lack of criminal prosecution of white students who hung a noose on a tree, who were disciplined by the school. Liberals' skills at moral equivalence have been so ...