Should We Be Blogging About the “Jena 6”?:

I’m with Glenn Reynolds on this. I’d really like to blog about the case, and I spent about 30 minutes this morning trying to research it, but I couldn’t get a good enough sense of what the facts are or what the precise cause of the protest is to really know what to make of it. Wikipedia has the best summary I could find, and it seemed to suggest that the problem was a decision by prosecutors to overcharge a case in an environment of severe racial tensions. Specifically, the state charged one juvenile as an adult and initially charged him with attempted murder even though there was no evidence of that intent (and then dropped it to assault with a deadly weapon, even though the evidence of a deadly weapon was questionable). But I did find it hard to get a sense of what was going on, at least so far. As Glenn puts it, “The signal-to-noise ratio [isn’t] that good.”

  UPDATE: I had missed this summary by Radley Balko, which is very helpful.

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