"On the afternoon of Oct. 7, 1974, a mob of 200 enraged whites, many of them students, closed in on a bus filled with black students that was trying to pull away from the local high school. The people in the mob were in a high-pitched frenzy. They screamed racial epithets and bombarded the bus with rocks and bottles. The students on the bus were terrified.
When a shot was heard, the kids on the bus dived for cover. But it was a 13-year-old white boy standing near the bus, not far from his mother, who toppled to the ground with a bullet wound in his head. The boy, a freshman named Timothy Weber, died a few hours later.
That single shot in this rural town about 25 miles up the Mississippi River from New Orleans set in motion a tale of appalling injustice that has lasted to the present day."
So begins a piece by Bob Herbert in the NY Times dealing with a convicted murderer Gary Tyler. Tyler is to be executed next month. But not untypically in the USA, a range of critical questions surround his conviction. Amnesty International, alngside many others, has taken up Tyler's cause as part of a Free Gary Tyler movement. Read the full Herbert piece here and also go to the links.
When a shot was heard, the kids on the bus dived for cover. But it was a 13-year-old white boy standing near the bus, not far from his mother, who toppled to the ground with a bullet wound in his head. The boy, a freshman named Timothy Weber, died a few hours later.
That single shot in this rural town about 25 miles up the Mississippi River from New Orleans set in motion a tale of appalling injustice that has lasted to the present day."
So begins a piece by Bob Herbert in the NY Times dealing with a convicted murderer Gary Tyler. Tyler is to be executed next month. But not untypically in the USA, a range of critical questions surround his conviction. Amnesty International, alngside many others, has taken up Tyler's cause as part of a Free Gary Tyler movement. Read the full Herbert piece here and also go to the links.
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