Civic Duty for Good Reasons

If I were a black man hoping for a fair trial in a town with racial tensions, I'd be ashamed that no blacks showed up for jury duty:

Bell faced an all-white jury. However, this did not result from the jury selection process. Instead, it resulted from an all white jury pool. The 150 people called for jury duty may have included black citizens, but only 50 people appeared, and none of them were black.

That was from Wikipedia, which I used because of their quantity of information not found in the press, but here's the main source.

I hadn't been following the story that closely, partly thanks to the ambivalence-inducing pathetic fact that stuff (everything from the 'race fights' to the seemingly racially motivated egregiousness of the charges) like this still happens in the South, so I'll keep my comments to a minimum.

I will comment on the obvious fact that tennis shoes are no more a deadly weapon than fists. And I don't think any teenager deserves 20+ years for getting in a fight where tennis shoes were the most dangerous weapon.