Race Trouble in Lee County

About to make a comeback? Well, I don't want it, but the actions of black jurors in Lee County can only help their cause. I refer to the recent trial in Marianna in which a jury split along racial lines in the trial of violent rapist/murderer Curtis Lee Vance of the rape of a white woman in that county. Vance was recently found guilty of the brutal rape and murder of TV reporter Anne Pressley.

The white jurors in this case voted to convict, the blacks to acquit. This despite overwhelming DNA evidence and the victims belief (though his face was covered during the attack) that Vance was her attacker. As the link above by David Koon reports, it is not the first time in Lee County that a jury split along racial lines resulted in a black man accused of raping a white woman walked free because the blacks on the jury voted to acquit (while the whites on the jury thought the accused was guilty).

I am not going to be PC here. You can go anywhere for that. These results indicate that many if not most blacks in Marianna are not willing to convict a black of a violent crime on a white person if there is any possible way they can talk themselves out of it. These results indicate that whites in Marianna will not have the protection of law because blacks on juries are extremely reluctant to convict people accused of serious violent crimes committed by people of their own race on people of another race.

Perhaps the black community has suffered many injustices at the hands of white authority figures in the community. There is no doubt that their great-great-great grandparents did. That is to say, it is likely that there was some past injustice that has led much of the black population of Marianna to rationalize race over justice. I don't think there is any justification for nullifying based on race, but I won't argue the point with anyone who does. I am just going to tell you what is going to happen if they don't get past it.

If whites in Lee county come to the place where they think they cannot get justice from the legal system, the most talented and productive among them are going to leave. That's what the victim did in this case. She is a very capable person who served well at her job, and now she is serving people elsewhere. A county that cannot afford to lose anymore talent, any more wealth, and anymore productive people will lose a lot more of all that. In the meantime if anyone else chooses to migrate to your communities in their place, it will not be people of the victim's caliber. It will be the Curtis Lee Vance's of this world. Predatory, brutal, both unwilling and unable to offer anything of value to a community.

Don't suppose that it stops there either. Tribalism will not end once the last white person has left the community. For if the community chooses to ignore justice in favor of race, it will also ignore it in favor of clique. No one will be assured of the protection of the law. Perhaps no Crip will convict a Crip of killing a Blood. Maybe it will be the reverse. And certainly no Crip or Blood will convict "one of their own" of killing the black people left in town who don't belong to any clique. The formal system of law will then break down +and vigilante justice will be the only justice to be had. Will the vigilantes be wrong? What if it was your daughter, or sister, or mother?

By that time of course all of the sensible folks of any color who have the talents and abilities to get out of there will have left, leaving the few that remain in ignorance, squalor, and violence. I write of this as if it is all a future event, but I wonder if this process has not already begun, with these cases simply alerting a wider world to what some former residents of any color have already discerned- the local population has cast off some of the fundamental values essential to live in a civilized society, and therefore it is unwise for a civilized person to live among them.

It may play out with a slightly different twist, that nevertheless ends the same. The whites who choose to stay, either because of attachment to the land or perhaps they are less talented, less connected, and have fewer options about other places to go, will simply resurrect the Ku Klux Klan, or some other vigilante organization like it, and began extra-legal executions of the Curtis Vances' among them. This strategy is unlikely to bring any more justice to the region. It may escalate into a general race war, it may provoke massive outside intervention, or the vigilantes may descend into the same amoral brutality possessed by the men they originally formed together to stop.

If that kink works its way into a phase of the cycle, it still does not change the ultimate outcome. Decent people of ability and talent will desert the region even more than they have. Brigands, Klanners, skinheads and trouble makers of every stripe will descend on the region to "get in on the action". The endgame remains one of ignorance, squalor, and violence.

I believe that the residents of Marianna, specifically those who consider race over justice and the law when sitting on a jury, have a spiritual problem. Therefore this requires a spiritual rather than a political solution. These folks, whatever they claim, don't accept what God's word says about truth and about justice or about the Brotherhood of Man. That they don't accept these things means that they do not really have faith in God. If they did, they would believe what He says. The eternal penalty for lack of faith is separation from God in Hell. The earthly penalty for living a lawless life is a foretaste of Hell in the form of misery here on earth. Whatever injustices have been committed on your community in the past, I ask the black population of Lee county to live like they believe in God, before the Judgement falls.