Lynching?

An appropriate post demonstrating that Ali’s fight against racial injustice remains far from over.

Jasmine Richards, an organizer with Black Lives Matter, was found guilty Wednesday by a Pasadena, California, jury of attempted lynching, a felony under California law. Her attorney says she was tried by a jury on which no black people served.

Richards’ conviction stems from an incident Aug. 29 when she led a peace march at a Pasadena park to bring attention to the 2012 police killing of Kendrec McDade. An unrelated altercation involving a black, female patron at a nearby restaurant caught protesters’ attention, including Richards’. When police tried to arrest the woman, protesters surrounded her and tried to take her out of police custody.

Police and prosecutors contend that the altercation between Richards and law enforcement morphed into a riot, and that Richards’ attempts to keep the woman out of police custody during the melée constituted an attempted lynching. California’s anti-lynching law was enacted in 1933 amid a spate of anti-lynching legislation across the country. California’s Penal Code 405a defines lynching as “the taking by means of a riot of any person from the lawful custody of any peace officer.”

That’s a rather problematic definition of “lynching.” It seems that the actual legal definition of it is what happens after the person is taken from the police. Evidently, the people in the 1850s fighting to keep slave catchers from returning escaped slaves to the South were lynching the poor law enforcement officials.

This is an amazing violation of basic principles of justice.