{"id":400174,"date":"2019-03-18T19:56:44","date_gmt":"2019-03-18T18:56:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/black-lives-on-trial\/"},"modified":"2019-03-18T19:56:44","modified_gmt":"2019-03-18T18:56:44","slug":"black-lives-on-trial","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/black-lives-on-trial\/","title":{"rendered":"Black Lives on Trial"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

March 18, 2018. Sacramento, California. Two police officers,\u00a0Terrence Mercadal and Jared Robinet,\u00a0respond to a 9-1-1\u00a0call about an individual breaking car windows. They track the suspect down.\u00a0They see the suspect is holding a gun. Or a tool bar. They fire twenty rounds.<\/p>\n

Seven bullets enter Stephon Clark\u2019s body from the back. One hits his chest.<\/p>\n

Clark, a 22 year-old black man in his grandmother\u2019s backyard, falls to his death.<\/p>\n

Turns out what he was holding was not a gun or a tool bar, but a cell phone.<\/p>\n

Almost a year goes by. On March 2, 2019,\u00a0Sacramento County District Attorney\u00a0Anne Marie Schubert\u00a0announces that no criminal charges would be filed against Mercadal and Robinet. The officers had not broken the law.<\/p>\n

Schubert\u00a0proceeds by pointing out that Clark had recently been\u00a0accused<\/a>\u00a0of assaulting the mother of his children. He had exchanged threatening text messages with his fianc\u00e9. He had looked online for information on penalties for domestic violence. He had searched the internet about suicide methods. He had drugs in his system the night of the shooting.<\/p>\n

In other words,\u00a0even if charges were pressed, it would be Clark on trial and not the officers.<\/p>\n

It happened with Trayvon Martin. A\u00a017 year-old black boy, walking back from 7-Eleven during halftime of the NBA All Star Game. A bag of Skittles and a can of Arizona Iced Tea in his pocket. A cell phone in hand. He was shot and killed by George Zimmerman who thought Martin…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair March 18, 2018. Sacramento, California. Two police officers,\u00a0Terrence Mercadal and Jared Robinet,\u00a0respond to a 9-1-1\u00a0call about an individual breaking car windows. They track the suspect down.\u00a0They see the suspect is holding a gun. Or a tool bar. They fire twenty rounds. Seven bullets enter Stephon Clark\u2019s body from the back. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-400174","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=400174"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400174\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=400174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=400174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=400174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}