Senate unanimously votes to make lynching a federal crime

[TexasTowelie]

Source: AP

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate has unanimously approved bipartisan legislation that would make lynching a federal crime.

The effort was led by two Democratic senators who are potential presidential contenders in 2020, Cory Booker of New Jersey and Kamala Harris of California.

Joining them as lead sponsors of the anti-lynching bill was the Senate's third African-American member, Republican Tim Scott of South Carolina.

Efforts to pass legislation making lynching a federal crime have failed repeatedly in the past. The sponsors of the bill say there had been nearly 200 attempts in Congress.

Read more: https://www.nwitimes.com/news/national/govt-and-politics/senate-unanimously-votes-to-make-lynching-a-federal-crime/article_42aa929e-c4f3-55c1-a89c-803083ee0aa9.html

[Gothmog]

1. Yeah for Senator Harris

[rurallib]

2. makes you wonder if Hyde-Smith got confused as to which side the bill came down on.

[George II]

3. Only about 100+ years late.

[GulfCoast66]

4. Yeah...too bad it is 160 years too late.

[Brainstormy]

5. Is this a joke?

and I'm not joking. Has it previously been legal to lynch people? The necessity for this has got to be either the saddest thing I've ever heard of or I'm missing something. So, specific forms of murder are federal crimes, but not all of them. ???

[PoliticAverse]

6. In general murder is not a federal crime.

See: https://bit.ly/2rNcMq6 Wikipedia Murder (United_States_law) Jurisdiction

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

9. If murder by lynching is a "hate crime", then I think it's already a federal offense.

So this seems redundant, unless there are lynchings that don't qualify as hate crimes. I don't have the lawyerly chops to envision lynchings that are not hate crimes.

[forgotmylogin]

10. Lawyers do what they can to disqualify something as a "hate crime".

I'm speculating, but I think what this law might do is make "lynching" a specific category of crime someone can be charged with instead of "assault/murder" which "also is a "hate crime." That makes it an automatic federal crime instead of a murder where the prosecution has to prove it was a racially-motivated hate crime and the defense getting to argue it wasn't, which lowers the sentencing stakes.

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

17. Lawyers will be paid to confuse the issues

Is this a lynching, as opposed to a "normal" non-judicial hanging? Is there hate involved, or is this ordinary revenge, jealousy, greed, which just happened to use a rope, as opposed to a wrench or a lead pipe?

However hard it is to prove a murder is a hate crime, it will be the same to prove a hanging is a lynching in the federal definition, whatever that is.

[sheshe2]

7. About f**king time!

[Hortensis]

8. Better looking-at-2020 than never.

Black DUers are going to be battling political media blizzards from left and right, and farther left-right.

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[jb5150]

11. Not sure what this is supposed to accomplish,

what's the point of making a specific method of murder a federal crime, if the crime is ruled a hate crime, it's already a federal crime irregardless of the method.

[NurseJackie]

12. Are the laws pertaining to hate crimes safe from repeal or being found unconstitutional by the USSC?

If so, this would be somewhat of a backstop in the event that a majority on the USSC go along with the argument that "it's impossible to read people's minds". I see it as an additional layer. Redundancy doesn't always mean unnecessary.

[DetroitLegalBeagle]

14. No law is safe from being thrown out by SCOTUS.

And this one or 100 more would do nothing to change that. Only way to "SCOTUS-proof" it would be to get it passed as a Constitutional amendment.

[Judi Lynn]

13. Why on earth would you object? My God. It should have been made law so long ago.

There is absolutely nothing in this step forward one could or should dream of debating.

It's dead wrong, now, and always, and it does need to be spelled out, since it still happens.

Quibbling over how much hatred it represents or not is so stupid. Hideous.

[jb5150]

15. I'm not saying I object, I was only asking

if it was necessary considering that all murders that are found to be hate crimes are federal crimes irregardless of how the murder is committed.

[summer_in_TX]

21. Well, what will it do to change the understanding of hanging an effigy

or leaving a noose in a public place?

If lynching becomes a federal crime, will threatening to lynch then be equated with threatening murder?

[Cold War Spook]

16. I worry about one thing.

You draw and quarter someone and your lawyer says it is not a hate crime because Congress was very specific that lynching is a hate crime but not specifically stating anything else is a hate crime.

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

18. Are lynchings still happening in the U.S.? nt

[BumRushDaShow]

20. 20 years ago this past summer

What did we learn from the Jasper dragging case?
Joyce King June 7, 2018 Updated: June 7, 2018 1:15 p.m.



<...>

Unknown to Byrd, the other two white men in the cab had been reminiscing about their time in a Texas prison unit as gang members in the Confederate Knights of America. A few miles later, the four men were in a dense thicket on a logging road barely wide enough for the truck. Byrd wanted to know where they were taking him.

When the truck stopped, King and Brewer attacked Byrd and forced him from the truck. Byrd, 49 years old and disabled, fought hard. He had no idea that his crime had been predetermined because his skin was the wrong color. Once Byrd was finally subdued, the murderers unraveled a 24-foot-long chain. They wrapped one end around Byrd, and the other end was knotted to the ball of the truck.

Byrd was dragged for three miles. First, in the cave-like forest that hid a logging road from curious eyes. The driver then turned left, onto Huff Creek Road, a paved street in the heart of a black neighborhood of the same name. For part of the dragging, Byrd was alive and struggling to keep his head off the pavement. His scraped body bounced from one side of the road to the other, until Byrd hit a concrete culvert in a ditch.

What was left of Byrd's lifeless body was released from the chain in front of a black cemetery. It was a message of terror waiting to be delivered by daylight. The culprits went home to sleep off their night of murder and mayhem in the woods. The trail of clues they left behind, including a set of work tools with the word "Berry" scratched on them, would lead straight to their door fewer than 24 hours later.

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/local/gray-matters/article/20-years-jasper-texas-james-byrd-dragging-case-12975767.php

Man executed for dragging death of James Byrd

By the CNN Wire Staff
Updated 1:13 PM ET, Thu September 22, 2011

<...>

Lawrence Russell Brewer was executed in Texas Wednesday evening for his involvement in the infamous dragging death of a black man 13 years ago. Brewer, 44, was one of three men convicted for involvement in the murder of James Byrd. He was executed by lethal injection at 6:21 p.m. local time (7:21 p.m. ET) Wednesday , according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

Brewer ate a huge final meal, according to Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesman Jason Clark. It consisted of chicken fried steaks, a triple-meat bacon cheeseburger, a cheese omelet, a bowl of fried okra, barbeque, fajitas, pizza, and a slab of peanut butter fudge with crushed peanuts. After the meal, Brewer was given time to make phone calls to family and friends.

Brewer and two other white men kidnapped the 49-year-old black man on the night of June 7, 1998. They chained him by the ankles to the back of a pickup truck and dragged him for 3 ½ miles down a country road near Jasper, Texas. Byrd died when he was decapitated after he hit a culvert. Prosecutors said the crime, which they described it as one of the most vicious hate crimes in U.S. history, was intended to promote Brewer's fledgling white supremacist organization. During his 1999 trial, they called Brewer a racist psychopath.

Brewer was a former "Exalted Cyclops" of a racist prison gang affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan. He spent most of his adult life in prison for burglary, cocaine possession and parole violations. During the trial, Brewer took the witness stand and contended that he was a bystander, not a killer. He tearfully admitted being present when Byrd was dragged to his death but, he said, "I didn't mean to cause his death. I had no intentions of killing anybody." Brewer said accomplice John William King initiated the killing by fighting with Byrd. He also said the third defendant, Shawn Berry, slashed Byrd's throat and then chained him to Berry's pickup. Brewer admitted kicking Byrd and spraying Byrd's face with black paint. But he said it was a reflex action taken to try to break up the fight between Byrd and King.

<...>

https://www.cnn.com/2011/09/21/justice/texas-dragging-death-execution/index.html

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

24. At least one perpetrator was executed for this murder.

This certainly should have qualified as a "hate crime". The perpetrators should have been locked up for the rest of their lives. No lawyer here, but does this "murder by dragging" qualify as "lynching"? Unclear to me.

[BumRushDaShow]

25. Yes, and also in this case

a white perp being executed for killing a black victim was rare.

I think there is a misconception that a "lynching" is the same as or is only a "hanging". One of the most famous "lynchings" (murders) in the '50s (1955) that literally kicked off the current Civil Rights movement and prompted Rosa Parks (who was a secretary for the local NAACP chapter at the time) to refuse to give up her seat on the bus (based on her disgust with this event), was the killing of Emmett Till. And he wasn't "hung", but just about everything else was done to him before his body was dumped in a river. His mother permitted the taking of photographs of what happened to him including the famous "open casket" image that was published in Jet Magazine (and other black media) at the time, in order to publicize the atrocities done to blacks in this country. If you do a google search, there are other ghastly photos of his body taken with his mother's permission, that aren't as well known as the open casket photo.

That Emmett Till case was literally just reopened this past summer (the woman who Till had been accused of "whistling" at is still alive and 10 years ago, had admitted to the author of a book on the ordeal, that she had lied during the ridiculous "trial" ).

Till's original casket is now on display at the National Museum for African American Culture and History (I was just there last month). When the state of MS reopened the case and the body was exumed, they were required by state law to rebury in a different casket so the original was available.

[BumRushDaShow]

19. The House would still have to pass it too and the claim has been

there may not be "enough time" and it would have to be reintroduced again.

<...>

According to the newspaper, the House passed the bill several times, but “southern senators had always blocked approval.” It is unclear whether this Congress has enough time to pass the legislation through the House, but the bill will reportedly be easy to reintroduce and pass through the new Congress next year. The Times reports the presiding officer for the bill’s floor debate was Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS), who was ridiculed last month for making a joke about a “public hanging” during her re-election run. Hyde-Smith later apologized for her remark.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/senate-unanimously-passes-anti-lynching-bill

And I wish the reporters of these stories would TELL people that a bill does not become a law without passage by BOTH chambers of Congress (not just the Senate) and generally, after signature of the President (where if it weren't signed, it would automatically become law after 10 days except right before the end of a Congressional session and then it would be a pocket veto).

[tblue37]

22. About freaking time! Now get it through the House, too. nt

[Shoonra]

23. to be fair ....

Yes, it's true that this proposal was often defeated in Congress. Back in the 1940s even Lyndon Johnson came out against such a proposal on the grounds that this would have been the only federal murder law applicable to the death of ordinary civilians (other than a law regarding the murder of a federal employee or officer) and it would already be covered by state laws against murder. Lyndon felt there was no good reason to elevate one particular type of murder to a federal offense when other kinds of murder were not. The fact that the states were seldom pursuing or prosecuting lynchers was brushed aside. In several instances, even in the absence of a federal anti-lynching law, federal investigation and prosecution was had in the form of law enforcement over a conspiracy to violate civil rights.