Posted on 08/13/2007 4:08:14 PM PDT by Main Street
By the time the letter marked "Return to Sender" was opened by an employee at the Montgomery County jail, prosecutors had assembled a strong case against Quinton J. Thomas: They had the cooperation of a woman who said she helped Thomas plan a robbery, and they had cellphone records that appeared to place Thomas near the Germantown parking lot where the victim of that planned robbery was fatally shot. Things looked so bad for Thomas, in fact, that his attorney had been urging him to consider pleading guilty to first-degree murder. Irritated, Thomas wrote a friend to complain about the attorney, Barry Helfand.
"Is this cracker stupid or he workin wit da state," Thomas wrote in profanity-laced, handwritten, four-page letter postmarked April 20. "I aint taken no plea to M1, ya hear me! They still Dont got no gun, eye witness, DNA, balistics, nothin."
What they did have, after it was returned to its sender, was the letter. On Tuesday, a Montgomery jury found Thomas, 22, guilty of murder and other crimes in connection with the Dec. 27, 2005, slaying of Stephen W. Kelley, 20, of Gaithersburg.
In the letter, Thomas asked his friend, a District resident, to keep a potential witness from testifying at his trial. "This white [expletive] can't make it to court on May 7 through May 12, ya feel me," Thomas wrote. "I don't care what you gotta do, you don't even gotta stink the cracker, he just cant make it to Rockville that whole week Homie."
Thomas told the letter's recipient what to do if he ran across the witness or others Thomas viewed as potentially damaging. "Man put they [expletive] IN THE DIRT, REAL TALK," he wrote.
The jail does not generally read inmates' outgoing mail, but it routinely screens incoming mail for contraband....
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
I ain't done did nothin' yo!
Stink the cracker? Will they need an interpreter for that during the trial
Yes, I thought it was a deliberate and well-considered form of verbal self-expresion designed to imitate and remind us of the rich African American story-telling rhythms and traditions.
Not an indication of literacy, at all.
Yep. I had to read a rather long bit of writing that someone who spoke like this was made to write, and it was scary (he had a high school diploma). Most foreigners I know can speak and write English better.
Just to show the hypocrisy and dysfunction in race issues in the US, if a white defendant had written the same letter urging intimidation of a black witness and displaying the same racial hatred with “n-——” instead of “cracker” and “black” in place of “white,” this would be national news on the MSM and the FBI and US Justice Dept would be involved. The Revs. Jesse and Al would be in everyone’s faces non-stop.
My my.....this “letter” is filled with black racist hate talk...
Shouldn’t they ADD that to the charges... HATE CRIME...
Too bad Mr. THomas couldn’t figure out a way to die during this.
No Darwin Award for you Quinton.
Sorry, you know the drill. Whitey can only be the perpetrator of a hate crime, not the victim. Next question?
I didn't realize people who talked like that knew how to write.
Click over to the WP and read some of the comments, funny.
Sure sounds like a racially motivated crime to me. Aren't there some federal statutes concerning such crimes? I think there are.
“I didn’t realize folks who talked like that also wrote like that. I always figured it was a spoken dialect.”
I always just assumed that people who talked like that were illiterate.
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