Posted on 03/28/2007 3:42:24 AM PDT by SkyPilot
DALLAS (AP) - A teenager has been jailed for more than a year for shoving a teacher's aide at her high school, a case that has sparked anger and heightened racial tensions in rural East Texas.
Shaquandra Cotton, who is black, claims the teacher's aide pushed her first and would not let her enter school before the morning bell in 2005. A jury convicted the 15-year-old girl in March 2006 on a felony count of shoving a public servant, who was not seriously injured.
The girl is in the Ron Jackson Correctional Complex in Brownwood, about 300 miles from her home in Paris. The facility is part of an embattled juvenile system that is the subject of state and federal investigations into allegations that staff members physically and sexually abused inmates.
Under the sentence handed down by Lamar County Judge Chuck Superville, she will remain at the facility until she meets state rehabilitation standards or reaches her 21st birthday.
But her family and civil rights activists say they want her home now. They are condemning the sentence as unusually harsh and say it shows a justice system that punishes young offenders differently, depending on their race.
Creola Cotton, Shaquandra's mother, and activists argue that while Superville sent Shaquandra to the state's juvenile prison system, he gave a white 14-year-old arsonist probation.
As many as 400 people marched and rallied in Paris on Tuesday, the second such protest in as many weeks by civil rights groups.
Meanwhile, the Paris school district fiercely denied claims of racism and chided the girl's mother for "playing a game" to start controversy.
Creola Cotton says her daughter received an unjust punishment for pushing the Paris High School employee. Her complaints have prompted federal civil rights investigations into the school district.
"My daughter has been (at Brownwood) a year now," Creola Cotton said. "It's time for her to come home."
In an interview with The Paris News, Superville said he chose the sentence because witnesses testified that placing Shaquandra back in her mother's care was not the best decision.
"If Shaquandra had been white, the outcome would have been the same," Superville said. "My decision was based on facts and law, and I am confident this was the correct decision based on the facts I was presented."
About 41 percent of students are black in Paris, a city of about 26,000 just south of the Oklahoma border. Fewer than 10 percent of the district's teachers are black, according to the most recent audit by the Texas Education Agency.
Dennis Eichelbaum, an attorney for the Paris school district, said the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights has vindicated the district by finding no evidence of discrimination in three cases. Five other investigations remain open.
Creola Cotton is preventing the district from fairly defending itself by refusing to let the school district make her daughter's entire record public, Eichelbaum said.
"Mrs. Cotton has been wrongfully attacking the character of the district," Eichelbaum said. "She's being disingenuous with regard to her daughter being an innocent child."
Added Eichelbaum: "She's playing a game."
Prosecutors say they offered Shaquandra a plea agreement that would have reduced the felony charge to a misdemeanor and given her two years' probation. But Creola Cotton rejected the plea on behalf of her daughter, prosecutors said.
A spokesman for the U.S. Department of Education said the agency handled nearly 1,000 discrimination complaints last year.
The part of the article that really stood out to me was that the "Justice" system was willing and ready to give the juvenile delinquent two year's probation and reduce the charge to a misdemeanor if she had "pled". But since she demanded her *rights* the System jacked the charge to a felony and the punishment to up to 6 years in jail.
Now, either 2 years probation is the correct punishment for what she did, or 6 years in jail is. Not both. And using plea "bargains" to attempt to extort guilty pleas (as in this case) is a foul and terrible corruption in the American justice system.
Academic success is dependant upon accountability. However, a white teacher demanding accountability from a black student is considered racist and oppressive in todays' society. I have experienced this first hand.
Most teachers are liberal white women who don't exactly command authority in the first place. I have observed this first hand.
Add to this the concept that black parents oftentimes tell their children not to respect or obey white people, so there is no motivation from home to behave; and in fact these parents acually WANT to live a vicarious life of "fighting the white power" through their children. I have been a victim of this first hand.
Perhaps all the preceding stems from "cultural differences". But if that is truly the case, the culture in question must be destroyed and replaced with something better, before it destroys us all.
I was thinking that being in jail for a year for a push was perhaps just a bit much. Then I read that the mother will not allow the school to release information about what other things the daughter has been caught doing at school. Sounds like the kid deserves some time in jail.
LOL! Your imitation of a liberal is spot on!
Sounds to me like she may have had discipline problems before but this sentence for this infraction is ridiculous.
I think it is a stretch of the term. Everyone these days in any government capacity gives themselves that moniker - from the DMV to postal workers - but they do have State and Federal law on their side whether you agree or not.
Public Servants to me are the military, police, and fireman.
However, don't belittle the mere "teacher's aide." My wife was one for awhile. She did an impossible job for very, very little pay. She got shaken down by the teacher's union. She was overworked by the school. She was verbally assaulted by idiotic parents who thought their criminal children were little angels. AND, she was literally assaulted by a student.
The punishment in the case for this story is only excessive because the parent chose to bob her head and wag her finger rather than be reasonable. In turn, she got the book thrown at her daughter.
Naaaah, really?!?
This reminds me of the wrestling case in Florida where the boy killed a girl while re-enacting some kind of wrestling moves he had seen on tv. The mother refused to cooperate with the court system and went for all or nothing and he got what most people considered an overly harsh sentence. I believe he was granted a new trial based on the argument that the mother didn't know what she was doing.
That is what needs to be done in this case. The girl was screwed because her mother did not have her best interest in mind, did not understand what was happening, or probably both. She needs a new trial and she could get off on time served.
But of course that woudl require the mother to swallow her pride, admit she was wrong, and turn the caretaking of this child over to some court selected responsible party.
http://freeshaquandacotton.blogspot.com/
The MSM is lying about this. The teacher's aide was an older woman described as "grandmotherly" by the witnesses in this case. She left the school on a stretcher and had to be taken to the hospital by ambulence. This was openly reported last year at the time of the trial when Shaquanda was convicted (see http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1810064/posts).
Shaquanda Cotton was also a major disciplinary problem with a history of threatening teachers with violence. One of the witnesses at her trial was a black school official who took her to the office after she threatened another teacher. When he gave her a disciplinary citation she threatened to burn the school down. He contacted Shaquanda's mother and she responded by calling him an "Uncle Tom."
ALL of these facts have been intentionally left out of the MSM's reporting of this case.
You're only getting part of the story. Contrary to the MSM's reports, the teacher's aide had to be taken to the hospital on a stretcher. Shaquanda also threatened violence against other teachers and threatened to burn the school down once.
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