Gone rogue! — Allen County’s “justice” system, that is – thus placing a welcome mat on Lima’s Interstate 75 stoop to swell city ranks with disgruntled, deep south-er types and drain more young brains lickety-split from this bog of legal madness.
Lima’s latest Welcome Wagon attraction for white folks features court sentences resulting from an event on June 10, 2022, when a white father (David Halpern), with his own gun, shot and killed his white son (Jaden), for which white prosecutors charged Black teenagers with murder.
I attended recent hearings where Bryanna Houston and Keion Darden, both with seemingly good backgrounds and clean records, were sentenced to 23 to 28 years in prison without possibility of early release, having agreed through back-room deals, to plead guilty to the “reduced” charges of manslaughter plus aggravated robbery with a firearm specification.
The accused were “defended” by white attorneys, sentenced by a white judge in a courtroom populated with white officials, where the only Black folks in the courtroom were the defendants and kinfolk comprising the major portion of the crowded gallery.
The details are, as I understand them and sparsely available to the public, due in part to the local legal system allowing, likely promoting, plea bargaining to replace a trial, a common practice as expressed in George Will’s March 10 opinion, “How government’s excessive reliance on plea deals can undermine justice.”
I encourage citizens to demand nothing less than a full public trial rather than observe, as spectators, the next feeding-of-meat-to-the-lions pretrial which is scheduled for Jaquan Glenn at 12:30 p.m.Thursday, June 29, to be followed by a trial on July 10, which the prosecutors will try their best to avoid.
Lyle Henry
Bluffton
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