Page 29 - 7-1-16 Friday's Edition

National
At The BET Awards, Actor
Man Gets 343 Years For Attempting To Kill Federal Judge
AARON RICHARDSON Sentenced to 343 years in federal prison
A 27-year-old man was sen- tenced to more than 300 years in federal prison on Friday. He was convicted of attempting to assassinate a federal judge.
According to court docu- ments, U. S. District Judge L. Scott Coogler sentenced Aaron M. Richardson, of Jacksonville, to serve 343 years in prison. He was con- victed of attempting to murder U. S. District Judge Timothy J. Corrigan.
Evidence presented at trial showed that Judge Corrigan sentenced Richardson to serve prison time in 2008, which was followed by super- vised release. Officials said Richardson violated his re- lease by committing 23 new crimes in Clay, Duval, and Vo- lusia Counties.
In an effort to avoid another prison term, officials said Richardson devised a plan he called “Mission Free- dom,” that involved prepar- ing false documentation dismissing all of the pending charges. The plan was to sign the judge’s name to the docu- mentation.
To prevent Judge Corri- gan from denying having written the court order, Richardson planned to kill him, official said.
As part of the plan, Richardson used the inter- net to determine where Judge Corrigan lived.
On June 21, 2013, Richardson took a Savage Arms .30-06 rifle from a Sports Authority store. The theft was captured on the store’s video.
The following night, Richardson went to Judge Corrigan’s home, and fired a single shot at the judge. The shot missed the judge by less than two inches, but hit the window frame.
Forensic evidence con- firmed that Richardson was present at the crime scene and the weapon used was the rifle previously stolen.
Richardson was arrested on June 25, 2013, by the U. S. Marshals Fugitive Task Force. He was charged with at- tempted murder as well as 23 related charges.
A Slave May Have Been
Jesse Williams On Black Lives, Equal Rights And Freedom
Behind The Creation Of Jack
At the BET Awards on Sunday night, after receiving the network's humanitarian award, Jesse Williams began with the usual litany of thanks. Standing with a slight hunch over a too-short mi- crophone, he celebrated his parents and his wife.
With that out of the way, the real speech began.
"This award, this is not for me," the activist and Grey's Anatomy star said. He hon- ored activists, civil rights at- torneys, parents, teachers, and "the students that are re- alizing that a system built to divide and impoverish and destroy us cannot stand if we do." He particularly cele- brated black women.
He condemned police brutality against people of color: "What we've been doing is looking at the data, and we know that police somehow manage to de-esca- late, disarm and not kill white people every day. So what's gonna happen is we are going to have equal rights and jus- tice in our own country, or we will restructure their func- tion, and ours."
The crowd rose in a stand- ing ovation.
"I got more, y'all," Williams said.
"I don't want to hear any- more about how far we've come when paid public ser- vants can pull a drive-by on a 12-year-old playing alone in a park in broad daylight, killing him on television and then going home to make a sand- wich," he said, invoking the name of not just Tamir Rice but also Rekia Boyd and Eric Garner and Sandra Bland and Darrien Hunt.
Then he told a room packed with black celebrities that just making money "isn't gonna stop this." He contin- ued:
"There has been no war
Daniel's Famous Whiskey
JESSE WILLIAMS
that we have not fought and died on the front lines of. There has been no job we haven't done. There's no tax they haven't levied against us. And we've paid all of them. But freedom is somehow al- ways conditional here. 'You're free,' they keep telling us. 'But she would have been alive if she hadn't acted so — free.'
"Now, freedom is always coming in the hereafter. But you know what, though? The hereafter is a hustle. We want it now."
He excoriated those who criticize black activists but don't call out oppression and brutality. And he had sharp words for those who profit off black culture without pro- moting black equality.
"We've been floating this country on credit for cen- turies, yo, and we're done watching and waiting while this invention called white- ness uses and abuses us, burying black people out of sight and out of mind, while extracting our culture, our dollars, our entertainment like oil — black gold. Ghet- toizing and demeaning our creations then stealing them, gentrifying our genius and then trying us on like cos- tumes before discarding our bodies like rinds of strange fruit," Williams said.
The Jack Daniel's distillery tour in Lynchburg, Tennessee has now begun informing visi- tors its eponymous founder may have learned the arts of distilling not from a local preacher and grocer named Dan Call, but instead one of Call's slaves, Nearis Green, the New York Times reported.
According to the paper, a variation of the whiskey label's founding myth in which Green was the one to instruct Daniel in distilling, not Call, has been around for decades, though it is only recently Jack Daniel's has begun telling it.
"This version of the story was never a secret, but it is one that the distillery has only re- cently begun to embrace, ten- tatively, in some of its tours, and in a social media and mar- keting campaign this sum- mer," the Times wrote. "... For years, the prevailing history of American whiskey has been framed as a lily-white affair, centered on German and
NEARIS GREEN
Scots-Irish settlers who dis- tilled their surplus grains into whiskey and sent it to far-off markets, eventually creating a $2.9 billion industry and a product equally beloved by Kentucky colonels and Brook- lyn hipsters."
"Left out of that account were men like Nearis Green," the paper added. The slaves who often built and manned the distilleries, as well as provided crucial and inno- vative ideas for the nascent in- dustry, often had knowledge of their contributions erased to the benefit of the white men who owned them.
Black Teen Tasered By Wisconsin Police At Shopping Mall
Madison Police have been slammed after a video has emerged showing officers manhandling a young African American girl and tasering her to the ground. The clip shows Genele Laird, 18, being arrested by two white officers outside East Towne Mall in Madison last Tuesday.
WISCONSIN- A shocking video of two Wisconsin police officers body slamming an 18- year-old girl to the ground, kicking and punching her and then tasering her while she screams in agony has pro- voked angry protests
The video filmed at a mall in Madison last week shows the two unnamed officers holding Genele Laird’s hands be- hind her back after detaining her at a mall where she was al- legedly threatening employ- ees.
Officers then begin to wres- tle her to the ground and kick her while doing so, before pin- ning her to the ground and tasering her several times.
Miss Laird screams out as she is tasered while the two of- ficers continue to hold her to the ground at East Towne Mall.
Although officers claim Miss Laird was resisting ar- rest and had a knife in her purse, the seemingly excessive force used in the arrest has provoked an angry reaction in her community.
A protest was held by the African-American community in front of the Dane County Public Safety Building last Wednesday afternoon.
Tutankhamun Assad, head of the Mellowhood Foun- dation told WKOW: 'The feel- ing I get everyday when I see one of ours treated like a ter- rorist, each and everyday, a young black woman with a knee in her back, called every sort of name - I can't take it anymore.'
But police say the video does not show the complete story and that Laird was ar- rested after she went into mall food court claiming to retrieve a phone from a Taco Bell em- ployee and then began making threats.
Following the arrest she was taken into Dane County Jail where was held for three days.
Madison Police Chief Mike Koval said at a press confer- ence: 'She even indicated that she had a knife and that she was willing to stab someone. And there was a flash of that knife.'
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