TOUGH ON CRIME, REDNECK STYLE!!
Rafi
SUBJECT: Shaquanda Cotton
AGE: 14 (At time of Crime)
CRIME: Pushing a Teachers Aid (No Injury)
SENTENCE: 7 Years in a Texas Juvenile Jail
RACE: Black
SUBJECT: Name withheld
AGE: 14 (At time of Crime)
CRIME: Arson (Burnt down house)
SENTENCE: Probation
RACE: White
Creola and Shaquanda Cotton
Protests are being held this week for a jailed teenager who has already
served one year of a seven-year sentence. Her crime -- shoving a teacher's
aide in her school hallway. Shaquanda has no prior arrest record and
supporters say the fifteen-year old is being unfairly punished because she
is African-American and because of her mother's previous involvement in a
group that fought discrimination against black students.
Shaquanda was convicted on one count of assaulting a public servant last
year. The teacher's aide was not injured and the incident's details are
under dispute. Shaquanda's detention facility is under investigation for
allegations staff members have committed physical and sexual abuse. The
judge in the case -- Chuck Superville of Lamar County -- has been accused of
double-standards after he sentenced a fourteen-year old white arsonist to
probation.
Shaquanda's seven-year sentence was recently extended because authorities
found her with unapproved possessions -- An extra pair of socks and a
plastic foam cup!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Please take a moment to plea for some human compassion from the Texas
Governor:
http://www.governor.state.tx.us/contact
Once there, Scroll down to fill the boxes
I'm writing regarding the status of 15-year-old Shaquanda Cotton in Paris
Texas.
I'm sure upon close review you will find it in your heart to see that she is
set free.
Thank you for your consideration. Rafi Bagramian Glendale, Ca
Write a Note of support to Shaquanda here:
https://www2.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=5658171739131752997
<https://www2.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=5658171739131752997&postID=481215
5867913326833> &postID=4812155867913326833
chicagotribune.com
To some in Paris, the sinister past is back
In Texas, a white teenager burns down her family's home and receives
probation.
A black one shoves a hall monitor and gets 7 years in prison.
The state NAACP calls it `a signal to black folks.'
By Howard Witt
Tribune senior correspondent
Published March 12, 2007
Shaquanda, a first-time offender, remains something of an anomaly inside the
Texas Youth Commission prison system,
where officials say 95 percent of the 2,500 juveniles in their custody are
chronic, serious offenders
who already have exhausted county-level programs such as probation and
local treatment or detention.
"The Texas Youth Commission is reserved for those youth who are most violent
or most habitual,"
PARIS, Texas -- The public fairgrounds in this small east Texas town look
ordinary enough, like so many other well-worn county fair sites across the
nation. Unless you know the history of the place.
There are no plaques or markers to denote it, but several of the most
notorious public lynchings of black Americans in the late 19th and early
20th Centuries were staged at the Paris Fairgrounds, where thousands of
white spectators would gather to watch and cheer as black men were dragged
onto a scaffold, scalded with hot irons and finally burned to death or
hanged.
Brenda Cherry, a local civil rights activist, can see the fairgrounds from
the front yard of her modest home, in the heart of the "black" side of this
starkly segregated town of 26,000. And lately, Cherry says, she's begun to
wonder whether the racist legacy of those lynchings is rebounding in a place
that calls itself "the best small town in Texas." "Some of the things that
happen here would not happen if we were in Dallas or Houston," Cherry said.
"They happen because we are in this closed town. I compare it to 1930s."
There was the 19-year-old white man, convicted last July of criminally
negligent homicide for killing a 54-year-old black woman and her 3-year-old
grandson with his truck, who was sentenced in Paris to probation and
required to send an annual Christmas card to the victims' family.
There are the Paris public schools, which are under investigation by the
U.S. Education Department after repeated complaints that administrators
discipline black students more frequently, and more harshly, than white
students.
And then there is the case that most troubles Cherry and leaders of the
Texas NAACP, involving a 14-year-old black freshman, Shaquanda Cotton, who
shoved a hall monitor at Paris High School in a dispute over entering the
building before the school day had officially begun. The youth had no prior
arrest record, and the hall monitor--a 58-year-old teacher's aide--was not
seriously injured. But Shaquanda was tried in March 2006 in the town's
juvenile court, convicted of "assault on a public servant" and sentenced by
Lamar County Judge Chuck Superville to prison for up to 7 years, until she
turns 21.
Just three months earlier, Superville sentenced a 14-year-old white girl,
convicted of arson for burning down her family's house, to probation.
"All Shaquanda did was grab somebody and she will be in jail for 5 or 6
years?" said Gary Bledsoe, an Austin attorney who is president of the state
NAACP branch. "It's like they are sending a signal to black folks in Paris
that you stay in your place in this community, in the shadows, intimidated."
The Tribune generally does not identify criminal suspects younger than age
17, but is doing so in this case because the girl and her family have chosen
to go public with their story. None of the officials involved in Shaquanda's
case, including the local prosecutor, the judge and Paris school district
administrators, would agree to speak about their handling of it, citing a
court appeal under way.
Retaliation alleged
The teen's defenders assert that long before the September 2005 shoving
incident, Paris school officials targeted Shaquanda for scrutiny because her
mother had frequently accused school officials of racism.
"Shaquanda started getting written up a lot after her mother became involved
in a protest march in front of a school," said Sharon Reynerson, an attorney
with Lone Star Legal Aid, who has represented Shaquanda during challenges to
several of the disciplinary citations she received. "Some of the write-ups
weren't fair to her or accurate, so we felt like we had to challenge each
one to get the whole story." Among the write-ups Shaquanda received,
according to Reynerson, were citations for wearing a skirt that was an inch
too short, pouring too much paint into a cup during an art class and
defacing a desk that school officials later conceded bore no signs of
damage.
Shaquanda's mother, Creola Cotton, does not dispute that her daughter can
behave impulsively and was sometimes guilty of tardiness or speaking out of
turn at school--behaviors that she said were manifestations of Shaquanda's
attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, for which the teen was taking
prescription medication. Nor does Shaquanda herself deny that she pushed the
hall monitor after the teacher's aide refused her permission to enter the
school before the morning bell--although Shaquanda maintains that she was
supposed to have been allowed to visit the school nurse to take her
medication, and that the teacher's aide pushed her first.
But Cherry alleges that Shaquanda's frequent disciplinary write-ups, and the
insistence of school officials at her trial that she deserved prison rather
than probation for the shoving incident, fits in a larger pattern of
systemic discrimination against black students in the Paris Independent
School District.
In the past five years, black parents have filed at least a dozen
discrimination complaints against the school district with the federal
Education Department, asserting that their children, who constitute 40
percent of the district's nearly 4,000 students, were singled out for
excessive discipline.
An attorney for the school district, Dennis Eichelbaum, said the Education
Department had determined all of the complaints to be unfounded. "The
[department] has explained that the school district has not and does not
discriminate, that the school district has been a leader and very
progressive when it comes to race relations, and that there was no validity
to the allegations made by the complainants," Eichelbaum said.
Not so clear
But the federal investigations of the school district are not so clear-cut,
and they are not finished. In one 2004 finding, Education Department
officials determined that black students at a Paris middle school were being
written up for disciplinary infractions more than twice as often as white
students--and eight times as often in one category, "class disruption." The
Education Department asked the U.S. Justice Department to try to mediate
disputes between black parents and the district, but school officials pulled
out of the process last December before it was concluded. And in April 2006,
the Education Department notified Paris school officials that it was opening
a new, comprehensive review to determine "whether the district discriminated
against African-American students on the basis of race" between 2004 and
2006. Federal officials say that investigation is still in progress.
According to one veteran Paris teacher, who asked not to be named for fear
of retribution, such discrimination is widespread. "There is a philosophy of
giving white kids a break and coming down on black kids," said the teacher,
who is white. Not everyone in Paris agrees, however, that blacks are treated
unfairly by the city's institutions.
"I've lived here all my life, and I don't see that," said Mary Ann Reed
Fisher, one of two black members of the Paris City Council. "My kids went to
Paris High School, and they never had one minute of a problem with the
school system, the courts or the police."
A peculiar inmate
Meanwhile, Shaquanda, a first-time offender, remains something of an anomaly
inside the Texas Youth Commission prison system, where officials say 95
percent of the 2,500 juveniles in their custody are chronic, serious
offenders who already have exhausted county-level programs such as probation
and local treatment or detention."The Texas Youth Commission is reserved for
those youth who are most violent or most habitual," said commission
spokesman Tim Savoy. "The whole concept of commitment until your 21st
birthday should be recognized as a severe penalty, and that's why it's
typically the last resort of the juvenile system in Texas."
Inside the youth prison in Brownwood where she has been incarcerated for the
past 10 months--a prison currently at the center of a state scandal
involving a guard who allegedly sexually abused teenage inmates--Shaquanda,
who is now 15, says she has not been doing well.
Three times she has tried to injure herself, first by scratching her face,
then by cutting her arm. The last time, she said, she copied a method she
saw another young inmate try, knotting a sweater around her neck and yanking
it tight so she couldn't breathe. The guards noticed her sprawled inside her
cell before it was too late.
She tried to harm herself, Shaquanda said, out of depression, desperation
and fear of the hardened young thieves, robbers, sex offenders and parole
violators all around her whom she must try to avoid each day.
"I get paranoid when I get around some of these girls," Shaquanda said.
"Sometimes I feel like I just can't do this no more--that I can't survive
this."
Updated
<http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-070326juveniles,1,1122206.stor
y?coll=chi-news-hed> Chicago Tribune Article
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-070326juveniles,1,1122206.story
?coll=chi-news-hed
<http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-070326juveniles,1,1122206.stor
y?coll=chi-news-hed&ctrack=2&cset=true> &ctrack=2&cset=true
Stay strong Shaquanda! Many are thinking of you!!
I just wrote to the Governor regarding your case and asked that he help set
you free.
When you leave, become an attorney and fight for justice everywhere. I know
you can do it.
Just remember to take things ONE DAY AT A TIME! And you can achieve it!!
Best Wishes,
Rafi Bagramian
Glendale, Ca
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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