Free Republic

JUSTICE. Finally. For a time, it looked as though this day would never come. It appeared that the brazen Aug. 2, 2007, shooting of journalist Chauncey Bailey in downtown Oakland would go the way of so many other unsolved murders in a city where it often seems no one is held accountable. Your Black Muslim Bakery leader Yusuf Bey IV was widely suspected of ordering Bailey killed to prevent the 57-year-old Oakland Post editor from publishing a story about the bakery's troubled finances. Yet Bey and accused accomplice Antoine Mackey were not charged with the killing until April 2009. For...

When the Rev. Karen Stokes was called to jury duty and found herself being screened for a long and complex trial involving a member of the former Your Black Muslim Bakery, her first thought was, "I can get out of this." When Alameda County Superior Court Judge Thomas Reardon said the trial would take about six weeks to complete, the calendar in Stokes' mind lit up. The trial schedule corresponded with Lent, the Christian season culminating on Easter. For Stokes, the pastor of Montclair Presbyterian Church, it was, in simple terms, her busy season. She listened as Reardon talked to...