USA: Black woman sentenced to jail after white driver kills her son.

[Bengal_Tiger]

A mother has been convicted of killing her four-year-old son after he died in a hit-and-run in the US because she crossed the road with her children at the wrong place.

Raquel Nelson had faced up to three years in prison - longer than the driver responsible for her child's death who served only six months behind bars.
However, the 30-year-old received a 12-months probationary sentence after the case caused public uproar in America.

Ms Nelson's son was killed in April last year when he was knocked down by a van after slipping from his mother's grasp as they crossed the road to get from a bus stop to their apartment building in the city of Marietta , north of Atlanta.

The distraught mum was also injured in the incident along with her young daughter.

Ms Nelson was subsequently prosecuted under the offence of jaywalking, which dictates that it is illegal to cross the road anywhere other than at a designated crossing point.


She was convicted by the all-white jury of second-degree vehicular homicide and other offences.

Her lawyer, David Savoy, said the driver was drinking and had taken painkillers on the night of the accident and was mostly blind in one eye.
He also had a prior conviction for a hit-and-run accident.

"For vehicular homicide in the second degree you don't have to be driving a vehicle," Mr Savoy explained.

"It requires that you caused the death of another. She 'caused' the death of another. How tragic is that?"

Judge Kathryn Tanksley, who also ordered the defendant to perform 40 hours of community service and pay a $50 (£30) fine, invoked a little-used Georgia state law to offer her a new trial at the end of a hearing in which character witnesses and spectators wept.


Ms Nelson's lawyer and other character witnesses described her as an exemplary mother shattered by the accident for which she blamed herself.
She thanked the court but refused to say whether she would accept the offer of a new trial.

Some critics said the judge should not have handed out a sentence in a case that should never have been prosecuted.

Sally Flocks of the group Pedestrians Educating Drivers on Safety said the case exposed a lack of consideration for pedestrians in a state with a car-centric culture.

Most users of buses in Marietta, a largely white and conservative community north of Atlanta, are black and on low incomes, said Ms Flocks.
"There probably wasn't a lot of empathy among the jurors. [At trial] they asked people had anyone used public transport in metro Atlanta," she said. "Nobody raised their hand."

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/mum-sentenc...111744335.html

[Bengal_Tiger]

Then we have rednecks like MDresden going to other countries carrying out illegal invasions, essentially nuking a country (Japan was nuked in a concentrated single hit, Iraq has been bombed all over with depleted uranium) and so on.....whilst they come from a very racist country and society, which includes the "liberal" north-east as well as the notoriously redneck deep south.

I really feel for black people in the USA.

[unknownprince]

Blacks have been destroyed by the US. They lack a culture. They are actually worse than the Native Americans because the Native Americans, what is left of them, still have preserved their culture.

[Bengal_Tiger]

The Jews were persecuted and then ultimately mass murdered by Christian Europeans...but they still had their culture and history.

Blacks were kidnapped, forced out of their homes in Africa, forced to work as slaves in the Americas with all their identity and culture wiped out. Last year I met an intellectual Italian sociology student who said he has no desire to ever visit the US as he disagrees with everything it stands for. I have never been to that sick redneck-infested country and may never do so.

I sincerely hope things get better for black people in the US.

Anyway the US is on the road to decline, facing bankrupcy, so less money to go invade, plunder and kill people in Muslim countries.

[randolph85]

eh

blacks destroyed themselves, blaming the white man has gotten old.

case in point, listen to black music from 40-50 yrs ago compared to now. that pretty much tells u everything u need to know.

btw, the woman was not sentenced to jail.

[Bengal_Tiger]

Black people have their share of the blame...but you cannot deny there is racism against them in many walks of life e.g. jobs or even buying a property.


As for her not being sentenced to jail, thanks for the correction. It was my misreading of the article, i.e she was declared guilty of offences punishable by imprisonment, though she wasn't actually given a prison sentence.

Raquel Nelson, 30, was charged with vehicular homicide because she was not crossing the street at the crosswalk in Marietta, Ga., at the time of the accident last year.
Nelson faced up to three years in jail on the charges

http://abcnews.go.com/US/mother-boy-...ry?id=14158040

However the unfairness (and probably racism behind it) is very evident when you read more about the case. Anyway anti-black racism is not something a lot of non-blacks can fully understand (I can, for a variety of reasons including having deep discussions with Afric.an-American Muslim brothers whilst I was studying in Syria, prior to that I had thought of it as over-sensitivity, "blame-culture" etc.....no, there is real horrible racism against black people)


The driver of the car was given six months in jail for hitting Nelson, one of her daughters and her son Aaron Newman last year, and then fleeing the scene.

ABC News
Aaron Newman, four, was killed on a Georgia... View Full Size


ABC News
Aaron Newman, four, was killed on a Georgia road in April of last year by a hit and run driver.







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Nelson was originally charged with reckless conduct, improperly crossing a roadway and second-degree homicide by vehicle.
"The fact that there was actually a charge was shocking," Nelson told ABC News before the sentencing. "And then later being convicted, that was even more shocking."
Nelson and her children were coming home from an early birthday celebration for Nelson and two of her children, all of whom have birthdays around the same time. The single mother, who relied on public transportation, missed one bus back home. The family had to wait an hour for the next bus, and that meant it was dark when they were dropped off at the bus stop right across the street from their apartment building. Nelson crossed the median with her children and waited for traffic to clear before venturing the rest of the way.
Mom Avoids Jail After Son Killed By Hit-Run Driver
"The rest of the people that had gotten off the bus with us had started to cross and my son let go of my hand," Nelson said. A.J., as he was affectionately called, darted into the street. "I ran out in the street and tried to grab him. He and my daughter and I were hit, and he … died from his injuries."
Jerry Guy, the man who hit the family and never stopped, reportedly admitted drinking "a little" alcohol earlier in the day. He also admitted to being on painkillers and being partially blind in one eye.
Guy had been convicted of two previous hit and run accidents. He pleaded guilty to the hit and run that took A.J.'s life and served six months in jail.
Nelson says she has had little time to grieve properly, given the court proceedings against her.
"Some people said I caused the accident because jaywalking was involved," she said. "They said that it was my responsibility and that I should have walked down the street to the traffic light."
But others point out the traffic light was a third of a mile away. That meant Nelson would have had to drag her children and packages a third of a mile to the light, cross the street, than backtrack a third of a mile on the other side of the roadway to get back to her apartment building.
"No pedestrian on earth walks a half mile or more out of their way simply to get across the street," said David Goldberg, communications director of Transportation for America, a coalition of groups that advocate for more transportation options.
Goldberg was stunned at the charges against Nelson.
"We couldn't believe that this woman had actually been charged with a crime," he said. "Once we saw the bus stop was positioned [with] her apartment complex … directly across from the street where she'd been put off by the bus."



http://abcnews.go.com/US/mother-boy-...ry?id=14158040

[randolph85]

there is racism but not enough to be an excuse for them to complain about it to the extent of blaming all their woes on it.

if my father can come to this country not knowing english, and eventually own his own home and have a good job, an african american has no excuse at all.

i sympathize with their plight but nowadays their problems are 90% their own fault.

[IamDZJ]

i am not going to waste my time reading this article because the title proves that it's written by a biased **** head right where it mentions the mother being black and the driver being white. it would have been a very interesting and powerful article had their skin color not been mentioned. i mean, imagine the mother being charged after her child was killed by another driver...o well.

[unknownprince]

there is racism but not enough to be an excuse for them to complain about it to the extent of blaming all their woes on it.

if my father can come to this country not knowing english, and eventually own his own home and have a good job, an african american has no excuse at all.

i sympathize with their plight but nowadays their problems are 90% their own fault.

I don't know. The dirty culture they practice is fashioned out of the dirty white culture. It is 10 times worst, but has the same dirty basics.

400 years of slavery. Yes it was their fault. They should have had the brain and cultural attitude to kill those who had come to enslave them. They should have taken up arms and struck fear into them. They should have burned their ships and hacked the people to death, but they did not.

They did not have the means to.

Same can be said of the Native Americans. They too should have ensured that every single pilgrim was hacked to death, and their blood was spilled all over because these pilgrims eventually did that to them.

They should have waged a war of attrition. Hunted them in their homes, spilled their blood everywhere.

But they didn't to such an extent, and now they are resigned to their fate on reserves.

[khushal]

Randolph is right here. America offers more opportunity to blacks than others. If a qualified black applicant applies for a job, he/she automatically gets it because of affirmative action. Companies must hire blacks and diversity has to be shown in the work place. If your black and can not make it in America, your basically an idiot or a substance abuser.
You can see the lack of motivation in black people when you go to their neighborhoods and all the business are owned by foreigners(asians, middle eastern, hispanics).

[IamDZJ]

it's ironic how the article about blacks being discriminated discriminates against the whites.

[unknownprince]

Their situation is mostly their fault, but it is also the fault of those who imposed over 400 years of slavery on them, and robbed them of their identity.

most still carry the slave mentality to this day, and their slave names.

Take Obama as a primary example, where instead of grinding his axe, and exacting some measure of revenge, he is serving his masters as if he is one of them. To top this all off, he is killing more poor people all around the world for them.

Back to the blacks though. They are an example of how a system can completely crush you. They did not fight because they did not know how to- and that is their fault.

They should have armed themselves or found some way to fight back, but they did not. They are a people with no culture, no spirit, anymore.

The end result is what you have today.

I have volunteered at schools in black areas, and the schools in their areas are widely underfunded because they do not pay taxes. As this is the case, they lack new text books, and rely on outdated ones. The condition of the school I volunteered at was dilapidated- not a place to study. There are many Americas in America, and the black America is a third world.

Asians have a culture that instills education in them. Blacks do not have this culture, but one of dancing, sex, and drugs- an extreme version of a culture given to them by the Anglo-Saxons.

Keep in mind, that there are an equally large number of poor whites who are in a bad condition for the same reasons, so not all is black and white, but poor and rich.

[IamDZJ]

instead of focusing on the 400 lousy years of being enslaved before being a failure in life, one can always choose not to do that and focus on today.
one should make the best of one's own life regardless of how lousy or glamorous the lives of their great grand parents had been 400 years ago. i hate people who are not only ashamed of being defeated in life but also give the credit of being failed in life to those who have failed them by blaming them constantly.

[tor_khan]

... There's hope ... the Americans have a black president with "Hussein" as his middle name ... something tells me that isn't going to happen so easily in Europe for a while yet ...

What happened in Norway is a reminder that Europe isn't over its own sleeping racism and there are some Europeans with the nerve to look down on others (in the ex-colonies) as "uncultured".

[khushal]

... There's hope ... the Americans have a black president with "Hussein" as his middle name ... something tells me that isn't going to happen so easily in Europe for a while yet ...

What happened in Norway is a reminder that Europe isn't over its own sleeping racism and there are some Europeans with the nerve to look down on others (in the ex-colonies) as "uncultured".

The thing is that in America, everyone excluding the natives who is less than 1% of the population is an immigrant. In europe, the indigenous population still makes up the vast majority so they feel threatened by immigrants.