Long Beach African-American Teens Get Wrist Slaps For Hate Crime

By
Omri Ceren
– February 5, 2007Posted in: News

UPDATE (15:25 PST) – The other sentences just came down, and it’s wrist slaps for everyone. CNN HN has a presser with the victims, and one of them can’t be there – because she was beaten so severely (for being white, remember) that she was undergoing facial reconstruction surgery. They were fixing her eyeball by putting it back correctly in her skull. No jail time for anyone – what a disgrace. What a total disgrace.

ORIGINAL – So there was a hate crime in Long Beach over Halloween. Nine African-American teens and one 12 year old African-American girl assaulted three white girls. Beat them up pretty savagely. All nine teenagers were found guilty of felony assault. Eight of them were found guilty of out and out hate crimes. Six of them were found guilt of inflicting gross bodily injury.

Last Friday the sentences started getting handed down. The punishment given by the judge to the first four? Wrist slaps:

Four teens were sentenced to probation and house arrest for 60 days for their roles in the Halloween beatings of three young white women attacked by a mob of black youths in Bixby Knolls on Halloween. An 18-year-old male, his twin sister, 14-year-old sister, and 16-year-old friend have been in custody since their arrest after the beating. They faced sentences ranging from probation to time in the California Youth Authority, although most involved in juvenile law agree the disposition will be geared more toward rehabilitation than punishment.

“We disagree strongly, but we respect the law,” Otto said. “This doesn’t feel like justice.”… In the attack, a group of 20 to 40 black youngsters surrounded and beat the women to the ground as trick-or-treaters gathered in a Bixby Knolls neighborhood. The hate-crime allegations stemmed from witness reports that several in the group yelled racial slurs during the assault, which occurred at about 9 p.m. Halloween in the 3800 block of Linden Avenue.

Not to be overly dramatic, but if the colors of the criminals and the victims were reversed there would be riots on the streets of Los Angeles right now. And thus does the California justice system continue its downward spiral.

Bonus question: does this finally give lie to liberal academics’ oft-published insistence that there is pervasive and institutional racism in the American legal system? It seems like an age of political correctness would cause the a politicized legal system to become more rather than less liberal.

Previously: Breaking: Hate Reaches Another LA-Area UC Campus – Swastika Graffiti At UCLA, Google Trends: Lots of People in Irvine Have Weird Tendency to Sound Like Anti-Semites, Maybe We Can Go To One of Their Rallies