Martin Lee Anderson's mom said the guards and lawyers laughed and joked during the trial.

[madfloridian]

Here is a Tampa 10 video interview with the parents of Martin Lee Anderson. I was amazed to hear them say he only "messed up" that one time. The whole media thing made it sound far worse than that.

Did you know he loved chess?

“He loved to play chess. As a matter of fact, he won first place at his school, Emerald Bay.”

This part just stunned me:

Martin Lee Anderson's parents speak out

Direct link to the video

Gina Jones, Mother
“It seems like to me if you look at everything like I was paying attention to it, it was like for the whole three weeks it was a joke to the lawyers and to the defendants. That's the way I felt. They were laughing and joking around because they already knew they were going to walk off and that's what happened.”

His mother was in tears when she said that the faces of the nurse and guards were the last thing Martin saw, and she wonders if sometimes at night when they're huggin or kissin their kids, do they see Martin's face?

I hope they see that face every night. The callousness shown over that trial and over the whole situation makes me wonder if it would touch their souls enough if they did see that face at night.

"In Bay County, Florida, it's still 1963." Palm Beach Post's scathing editorial.

No one who observed the boisterous gloating in and outside of a Bay County courtroom last week would have thought that a child had died.

"We're on cloud nine," defense attorney Waylon Graham said, "and there's nothing sweeter than having eight not-guilty verdicts."

When Mr. Graham boasted after the jury's Oct. 12 verdict that he was going to party and "drink lots of alcohol and smoke a lot of big cigars," he clearly did not have in mind the 14-year-old boy whose death a year and a half earlier led him to court to defend a guard who had helped beat the teenager until he fell limp, into a coma and was placed on life support

Mr. Graham had a message for the governor after an all-white jury spent about an hour and a half deciding to acquit of manslaughter the seven guards who beat the black teenager at a juvenile boot camp and a nurse who stood by and watched the 40-minute attack: "I'd like to say to Charlie Crist: Put this in your pipe and smoke it."

How small a town is Panama City? Just across the street from the courthouse where the guards and nurse are being tried sits the camp. Shut down like the rest in Florida after the video made national news, it sits abandoned, razor-wire gates rusty.

Tired of scenes of a boy collapsing and dragged upright again, I left and drove to where Martin lived. It is literally on the other side of the tracks, a scrubby street of ramshackle houses.

A few blocks over is the cemetery, the grass too high, fence sagging. He is there, flanked by stone angels, not a hero, not a monster, just gone.

What will the jury call what happened to Martin Lee Anderson? Sad comes to mind. And sorry. And wrong.

[flashl]

1. Everyone knew the verdict before the trial end. n/t