February 28, 2007
Private: Civil Suit Filed Against Texas Hate Criminals
Two years ago, ACSBlog asked this question:
In what year did the (since-retired) white mayor of the small town of Linden, Texas make the following statement regarding a sadistic assault on a mentally retarded black man by four white men who subsequently received little punishment?
I don't think there was anything racial about it. These guys were drinking, and this guy [Johnson] liked to dance. I'm not surprised when they get to drinking and use the n-word. The black boy was somewhere he shouldn't have been, although they brought him out there.
In that case, a group of drunken white residents of Cass County, Texas kidnapped a mentally disabled black man, spent an evening humilating him, then dumped him, bleeding and unconscious, on top of a mound of fire ants. This incident occured in 2003, and the mayor's comments were made in 2005. The assailants were convicted only of misdemenors, and served little or no jail time.
This story has an epilogue, however, a civil suit has been filed on behalf of the victim, seeking to recoup the costs of a lifetime of nursing care for the victim:
THE CIVIL SUIT, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has filed on Billy Ray’s behalf, is slated to go to trial on April 2. Based in Montgomery, Alabama, the nonprofit group takes on high-profile civil rights cases, as it did most famously in 1987, when lawyer Morris Dees won a $7 million verdict that bankrupted the United Klans of America after two of its members in Mobile lynched a young black man named Michael Donald. Billy Ray’s suit, which names the four defendants, is seeking unspecified damages to cover the cost of speech and physical therapy as well as long-term care. “This justice system totally failed Billy Ray and his family,” Dees told me. “We want to give a jury the chance to correct an injustice in their community by presenting all the facts, many of which were not available to the juries in the criminal cases.” When I asked if he was worried about the odds of finding twelve impartial people to impanel, Dees claimed to be unconcerned. “These jurors grew up in a Christian community, and they know what’s right from wrong,” he said. “We have to present the case so they can see that Billy Ray is a human being who deserves to be treated just like anyone else.”