CRACKPOT CRACKDOWN

Austin Chronicle ^ | OCTOBER 21, 2005: | JORDAN SMITH

[JTN]

Jackson County's DA Has Convicted 28 Black People on Drug Charges Via Manufactured Evidence and Railroaded Trials. Now a Small-Town Exile, Her Family, and a Few Neighbors Are Fighting Back

Frederick "Rick" Patterson was born in the small Southeast Texas city of Edna, seat of Jackson Co. and just north of Port Lavaca, in 1954, the same year the rural community earned its first moment in the national spotlight. That January, the U.S. Supreme Court heard an appeal brought by convicted murderer Pete Hernandez, an agricultural worker in Edna, who argued that Jackson Co. prosecutors denied his right to equal protection under the law by excluding Mexican-Americans from the jury pool. Hernandez's attorneys had discovered that from 1929 to 1954, not a single Mexican-American had ever served on a Jackson Co. jury - nor, for that matter, had any black juror. The state Court of Criminal Appeals had rejected Hernandez's argument - ruling that Hispanics were a subset of whites and therefore could not be considered a "special class" under the 14th Amendment. But on May 3, 1954, in a precedent-setting opinion authored by Chief Justice Earl Warren, a unanimous Supreme Court disagreed. Hernandez had "the right to be indicted and tried by juries from which all members of his class [were] not systematically excluded," Warren wrote. Indeed, Warren noted that courthouse practice itself belied Jackson Co. officials' assertion that Mexicans were considered equal to whites, for the courthouse had two separate men's restrooms - one for whites, and the other labeled for "Colored Men" and "Hombres Aqui."

Fifty-one years later, it seems, too little has changed in Edna.

[LibertarianInExile]

Just because the OJ jury was stupid doesn't mean their verdict should be overturned. I don't necessarily agree with them, but I don't think we should try people again and again until they're proven guilty, either.

This article is advocating something just as evil, the overturning of all those convictions because the authors think the convicted are innocent. Anyone backing the authors is doing so purely on the basis of their slanted presentation of the facts here, which may or may not be as they describe, and based on the track record of the paper, is unlikely to be accurate.