Clarence Thomas
The ultimate sellout?
Now that 17 years has passed since the infamous hearings that saw Law Professor Anita Hill testify before congress about Justice Thomas' s*xual harassment accusations the paths which the two individual legal experts have traveled speak volumes about who may or may not have been telling the truth in October of 1991.
Hill went on to become a professor at Oral Roberts University and the University of Oklahoma College of Law among several other accolades including penning a book on race and gender in America.
Thomas went on to become a flunky for the republican party, consistently ruling on the conservative side of cases brought before the supreme court.
Instead of attempting to recollect all of Thomas' abysmal voting record as it pertains to minorities, I'll bring you up to speed on the most recent slap in the face that Thomas dealt to black people.
For years the federal guideline for sentencing drug offenders was overwhelmingly slanted in favor of offenders who were convicted of crimes involving cocaine in powder form as opposed to offenders who were caught with the hardened or 'crack' version of the same drug. For years, studies had confirmed that blacks are 10 times more likely to be convicted of a crime involving crack cocaine than powder cocaine, primarily because the crack version of the drug is broken up and sold for smaller dollar amounts than it's powdered cousin. In fact, the sentencing was such that an individual caught with 5 grams of crack would receive a sentence proportionate with an individual who had been caught with 500 grams of cocaine. This dynamic was exacerbated by the fact that federal courts had instituted mandatory sentencing laws for crack cocaine drug offenders which created a gluttony of young black males and females who found themselves sentence to uncommonly long prison sentences which sometimes exceeded the sentences of many violent offenders and because judiciary has put mandatory sentencing into place, federal judges' hands were tied if they felt as though an offender brought before his or her court may be just an isolated incident or if there were factors that may have warranted leniency.
Well lo and behold the Supreme court (a very conservative supreme court I might add) ruled 7-2 last year that the federal sentencing guidelines were racist in nature (their words, not mine), and allowed federal judges more freedom in sentencing. Guess who were the two dissenting votes? Samuel Alito and yes our man Clarence Thomas.
Let us not forget this is the man who officiated Rush Limbaugh's wedding, and you know Limbaugh is on the list.
Posted By: Curly Morris
Friday, August 22nd 2008 at 11:44PM
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