I wanted to follow up on YinYang’s previous post about racial privilege by providing an example of another form of privilege in the US justice system – class privilege. I posted this story (reported through a different source) under the comments section in his post. But since more details have surfaced, I wanted to highlight this story in its own post because it reinforces YinYang’s point in another way. Unlike the bicycle incident, this is not some media experiment, this actually happened in REAL LIFE under a judicial system that promises “liberty and justice for all”.
Remember all that talk in the US media about judicial injustice in China? I wonder how the Chinese public would react to the type of “justice” meted out in this US court:
Rich Teen Kills 4, Avoids Prison Thanks To ‘Affluenza’
Here is the gist of the story: A Texas teenager stole some beer then crashed his truck while drinking and driving. He killed four pedestrians, and crippled two of his passengers for life. The judge gave him a slap on the wrist (10 years probation); he accepted the defense attorney’s argument that “because this is a affluent kid, he has always been allowed to get away with things, and therefore do not know the difference between right and wrong.”
How would people in China react to this kind of non-sense?
N.M.Cheung says
This case is not really unusual in Texas. I remember another case in Texas a few years ago. A rich Texan enraged at a judge ruling against him in a divorce case. He tried to hire a killer to kill the judge, in fact the hired killer was an FBI agent, they photographed the judge covered in blood and exchanged it with money and witnessed and recorded. But the man hired a good lawyer and get away with a not guilty verdict because the lawyer argued entrapment. Meanwhile we have all those poor and blacks on death row and even executed prisoners proved their innocence by new updated DNA evidence, especially those rape and murder cases where it matched the DNA with other killers while the innocent languished in death row because of coerced confession or executed. In U.S. money makes all the difference, it’s the law/ lawyers you can buy.
Black Pheonix says
Texas Teen: “My Dad is AFFLUENZA!!!”
LOL! 🙂
ersim says
It’s not U.S. “justice”, it’s either JUST IS or JUST US (rich people).
YinYang says
When the colored people are implicitly painted as savages, its easy for the public to let this sort of things slide when it’s against the colored people.