There are many ways to lynch a man. The one most people think of when they hear the word is by hanging. If you're more historically well-informed, however, you might know that -- in earlier periods -- it often involved more complicated and even ghoulish processes that left a body mangled and mutilated, all of which might have been accomplished in broad daylight in front of hundreds of White people who brought picnics and their children and showed up for the express purpose of enjoying the show.
We shudder to imagine such a thing today, though I would argue that any time a law "enforcement" officer kills a person (particularly a Black person) in cold blood without due process, it is, in fact, a lynching, no matter what they call it officially and whether or not there are any repercussions. The article I am re-posting today is about a different kind of lynching: the continued incarceration of a man who has spent the past 54 years just ninety-minutes up the road from where I live in Louisiana.
He committed the crime of murder in 1963 as a juvenile, a crime of which he was convicted and for which he was sentenced to life without parole, an option Louisiana uses at four times the national rate. But then, in 2016, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that cases like his could end in release. Yet he still sits in Angola and I think he's being lynched. The story was reported by Aviva Shen in The Appeal in February and I am re-posting it here.
