Posted on 10/14/2002 4:01:10 AM PDT by kattracks
(CNSNews.com) - The Wichita, Kan., trial of two brothers charged with murdering five people and wounding a sixth in a December 2000 crime spree has local residents and prominent black leaders wondering why the national media have been relatively silent in the matter.
Because the suspects, Jonathan and Reginald Carr, are black and their victims white, many observers in Wichita expected the brothers to be charged with hate crimes, which presumably would have sparked national news coverage.
It didn't happen and some are raising the specter of a racial double standard by the national media, based on the lack of news coverage of this mass murder.
Wichita District Attorney Nola Foulston said earlier that the crimes were motivated by robbery and not racial hatred. In addition, she said, the state of Kansas has no hate crime law.
Neither Foulston nor defense attorneys Val Wachtel and Jay Greeno representing the brothers would grant interviews to CNSNews.com until the trial was over, saying the judge in the case has placed them under gag orders.
Blacks Question Dearth of National Coverage
Ken Hamblin, a black syndicated radio talk show host, said he thinks the case should be prosecuted from a hate crime standpoint.
"Clearly, it was a hate crime. It was a very malicious hate crime. It was brutal hate crime. When you look at how brutal and malicious the act was, there was a venomous attitude towards people in a particular race in question because they didn't know them," he said.
Hamblin said he wasn't even aware of the case, admitting that even in his capacity as a talk show host, and despite the fact that "this is exactly the kind of stuff we cover ... I had no clue."
"It's another perfect example of the double standard brought about by the media," Hamblin said.
Akbar Shabazz of the black conservative group Project 21 is not surprised that the trial is receiving minimal coverage.
While Shabazz does not believe the Carrs committed hate crimes, he added, "It's not popular to portray black on white crimes in the national media today because it's politically incorrect."
"The cases are very rare when you do have black on white hate crime prosecutions. But I don't see the hate crimes angle. I feel that these are some brutal guys who definitely deserve the death penalty, but I didn't think that they took them and killed them strictly because they were white," Shabazz said.
Limited National News Attention
Local news coverage of the trial has been intensive, but even local residents have taken note of the absence of national attention.
One recent letter to the editor to the local Wichita newspaper was blunt about the lack of national media attention.
"If this had been two white males accused of killing (five) black individuals, the media would be on a feeding frenzy and every satellite news organization would be in Wichita doing live reports," claimed Trent Hungate in a letter to the Wichita Eagle.
The CNN website Friday published one Court TV account of the Carr trial. The Fox News website published an Associated Press story about the trial on Tuesday. The ABC News website moved a story on Sept. 6. CBS News and MSNBC made no mention of it on their websites.
On the local front, two Wichita cable television channels and one radio station are providing continuous coverage of the trial, and the regional Associated Press has been covering it as well.
The Wichita Eagle reported Friday that many locals gathered around televisions at the local YMCA, a local health club, local residences and offices to see what was transpiring at the trial.
Other Wichita citizens are taping portions of the trial to watch after they finish work or school.
One merchant, Tom Young told the newspaper he has been watching the trial all week. "I'm glued and repelled at the same time," he said.
"What happened is so terrible, so horrifying. But there's something about seeing a live courtroom, which is so different from Hollywood. It's like seeing justice in action," Young said.
KWCH-TV General Manager Kathy Mohn told the Eagle her station has not received any negative calls about the coverage. Some viewers have requested gavel-to-gavel repeats at night.
"We feel we are being very responsible to provide coverage because of limited seating in the courtroom. But we will not repeat it because it is not entertainment and particularly not at night, when children would have greater access to it," Mohn said.
Syndicated columnist Sam Francis has accused the national media of "passivity" for its lack of coverage.
"When a white commits a murder against a black, it's national headlines. But when two blacks force their way into an apartment, rape two white women and take them and their three white male friends and murder them in cold blood, it's not even worth a national news story," said he in a recent column.
Francis also thinks the trial hasn't received much national coverage because Kansas has no "hate crime" statute, "so there was no legal purpose in searching for a racial motive behind the crime," he said.
"Since the media do a good deal of searching in crimes where the race of victims and killers are reversed, one might expect them to undertake a little investigative reporting in this crime. They haven't," Francis said.
But Shabazz thinks Francis is exaggerating the facts in the case. "I don't believe that all white on black crimes receive national attention. But I do believe that this crime and this act, as gruesome and brutal as it was, just doesn't fit into hate crimes legislation as it is written today," he said.
Shabazz emphasized that if the Carr brothers would have "found any rich person or anyone else they could have robbed, they would done the same thing to them."
Justice Department Silent
The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) Friday did not return calls seeking comment on why the federal government was not pursuing hate crimes charges in the case.
The department's website describes hate crimes as "offenses motivated by hatred against a victim based on his or her race, religion, sexual orientation, handicap, ethnicity, or national origin," but also warns about the need to distinguish between certain crimes.
"While such a definition may make identifying a hate crime seem like a simple task, criminal acts motivated by bias can easily be confused with forms of expression protected by the U.S. Constitution," the Justice Department website states.
DoJ also states, "African Americans are more likely to be targets of hate crimes than members of any other group. Of the nearly 8,000 hate crimes reported in 1995, almost 3,000 of them were motivated by bias against African Americans. Other typical victims are Jews, homosexuals, Muslims, and, increasingly, Asian Americans," according to the website.
Currently 42 states and the District of Columbia have some type of hate crime law, according to DOJ. Arkansas, Georgia, Hawaii, Indiana, Kansas, New Mexico, South Carolina and Wyoming have no state hate crime laws.
E-mail a news tip to Jim Burns.
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If we're not careful, the twisted lefties will spin what little they let the national media cover to the great unwashed, as a reason for more Hate Crime legislation, to be used on us! The thought police have begun to whip up a scenario imbedded deep in what little coverage is being linked out. Soon the only thing you will read is the forces of evil calling for stiff and foolproof laws protecting society from haters of perversion and rights of the truly kindhearted to fondle or murder our children.
Why not use this blatant example of selective enforcement as a prime example to abolish this creepy law everywhere else and look for the numerous places were the same injustice is being perpetrated!
Five people are dead. But for the grace of God it would be six. The people who did this are on trial. When convicted, and I have no doubt that then will be, and when sentenced to death, and again I have no doubt that they will be, they will be taken to the correctional facility at El Dorado and held there through their endless appeals before being bussed over to Lansing and executed. I don't care if the victims were white and the killers were black, or vice versa. The killers are going to pay and all the media attention in the world will not change that, or speed it up.
But, you must remember that Blacks attacking and killing Whites is not "hateful" in the eyes of the media. It's just something to be expected.
Won't be long before Rev. Jesse, Chocran, Rev. Sharpton will be out druming sympathy for the two brothers.
In order to have a "hate crime" the perp MUST be capable of human reasoning. These two mutants are not capable of human emotions - thus, no hate crime.
They are like the hyenas in Africa - prey on the weak and unexpecting. How many tens of thousands more roam our streets looking for an easy kill?
By ROXANA HEGEMAN, Associated Press
WICHITA, Kan. (October 13, 2002 1:46 p.m. EDT) - The grim details of how two brothers allegedly committed a nine-day crime rampage that left five people dead are being closely monitored by a community that is still shaken nearly two years after the slayings and more than a month into the brothers' murder trial.
The apparently random abduction of five friends from a home on Dec. 14, 2000, is the darkest detail to surface. Investigators say the victims were forced to engage in sexual acts and withdraw money from automated teller machines. Then they were all shot, execution-style, as they knelt in the snow on a dark soccer field.
Four of them - Aaron Sander, 29; Heather Muller, 25; Brad Heyka, 27; and Jason Befort, 26, died.
Befort's girlfriend, then a 25-year-old teacher, survived. Bleeding from a head wound, she ran barefoot and naked through the snow for nearly a mile to find help.
Reginald Carr, 24, and Jonathan Carr, 22, now face a total of 113 charges, including murder. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.
The "alleged" (perhaps they are "allegedly" dead, too) crime spree began on Dec. 7, 2000, with the abduction of Andrew Schreiber, who was also forced to withdraw cash from an ATM but was otherwise left unharmed.
The crimes escalated on Dec. 11 with the shooting during an attempted robbery of Ann Walenta, 55, who later died.
The case has become a rallying cry for white supremacists groups across the nation because the suspects are black while all the victims were white. Weeks before the trial was set to begin, a Nazi group held a rally in Topeka where the case was repeatedly cited.
Prosecutors are not trying the case as a hate crime. They say robbery was the motive.
Wichita Mayor Bob Knight - who has made improving race relationships a cornerstone of his administration - said Friday that regardless of race and ethnicity, what occurred could be described as "raw, brutal and evil."
"You have innocent people tortured, killed, humiliated by someone who is little more than an animal. I'm not looking at it as a black and white issue," Knight said. "I am not a big fan of capital punishment, but if anything deserves people losing their lives, it is this kind of heinous crime."
Jurors appeared riveted by the survivor's testimony on Oct. 10.
"As I was kneeling, there was a shot. And I don't remember, we were all screaming, but I can remember hearing Aaron say, 'please no' - he used the word 'sir.' There was another one, and another one, and then another one, and then everything kind of went gray as I was shot," she said.
She said she felt the impact of the bullet, but did not fall forward until one of the men kicked her. She heard the men get into the truck and waited until she could no longer see headlights before she got up to check on her friends to see if they were alive.
"I went to Jason," she said. "I rolled him over. He had blood coming out of one of his eyes. I still had on my sweater and I took it off and tied it around his head to act as a tourniquet to try to stop it."
The trial began Sept. 9. Jury selection lasted 18 days. The state was still presenting and planned to resume on Monday.
Dan Walker, a construction worker who was working at a job at the Sedgwick County Courthouse where the case is being tried, spent his lunch break watching the trial on TV.
"It was so bad what was done to these girls and these boys - it wasn't just homicide, it was brutal murder," Walker said.
Denise Taylor, a courthouse worker, says she listens to or watches the trial coverage every day.
"I want to see what it is that provoked them to do such heinous crimes, and why five people couldn't overpower them to save their lives," Taylor said.
But at Augusta High School - where Befort was a science teacher and junior varsity basketball coach - the radios have been turned off in the administration offices.
The deaths hit teachers and students hard, and the school was shut down for the funeral, said superintendent Jim Markos.
"That was kind of closure for us, and it was a good closure," Markos said. "Now it was reopened again with the trial."
If white people develop a sense that they can be preyed upon at will, and only the neo-Nazis seem to care, that will be a big recruiting tool for the neo-Nazis
I agree that this was not a "hate crime" as those words are used in "hate crime" statutes. [Those statutes themselves are offensive, but that is another diatribe for another day.].
The brothers Carr were after money first and foremost and were willing to take whatever cheap thrills they could get in the process. It is a simple fact of life that in this country that whites, on average, have more money than blacks. So, it is easier, when whites commit crime on blacks, to conclude that there must be some other motive at work. The James Byrd case is an excellent example; his killers were clearly not after money. Kansas doesn't have a "hate crimes" statute (for which it should be applauded). Even if it did, what basis would the prosecutors have for charging this crime under such a statute. Yes, all of the victims were white. Would the Carrs have shown the same animal viciousness to fellow blacks? Perhaps not, but, on the evidence they have, how are you going to prove that in a court of law? Do you assume just because they chose middle-class white victims the motive had to be race? Willie Sutton was once asked why he robbed banks. His answer was, "'Cause that's where the money is."
Even without a "hate crime" label, though, this is still a horrible crime that in normal circumstances would merit national coverage. Five young adults brutalized, tortured, raped, and shot execution-style on a frozen field. Come on, media, you cover crimes less serious than that on a national basis all the time. It is clear the national press is steering away from this case because of the extreme brutality and depravity the Carrs showed toward their victims. It is just not PC these days to portray blacks in this way. Whether the portrayal might be accurate insofar as the Carr brothers are concerned is just not an issue for the national media. Their fear is that those who read of this case will generalize and ascribe the conduct of the Carrs to all blacks. That is absurd, of course, but I can't help wondering whether it is because these bastions of PC are themselves tempted to make this leap in logic that they assume all of the rest of us will as well.
So, my politically correct media elite friends, here is a word of advice. You just worry about reporting the news. That is your job. You leave to the rest of us the task of trying to decide what the news means. That is our job, and, despite your doubts and condescention, we are quite capable of doing it without your guidance.
Just as when two dumbass straight guys murder a gay man and leave his body hanging on a fence in Wyoming, it's a national outrage, but when two queer hairdressers in Arkansas repeatedly sodomize and eventually kill a 14-year old boy, it's not mentioned. RIP, Jesse Dirkhising.
Scouts Out! Cavalry Ho!
Bingo.
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