Tag: New Orleans
Black Lives Matter leader shot dead
The Black Lives Matter leader known for diving over a barrier to snatch a Confederate flag from a protester on live TV last year was shot dead in New Orleans, police said.
Muhiyidin Elamin Moye, who went by Muhiyidin d’Baha, was found dead Tuesday morning after being shot in the thigh while riding his bicycle, the Advocate reported.
New Orleans police spokesman Beau Tidwell said no information about a potential motive or suspects was immediately available.
D’Baha, 32, moved to South Carolina from Poughkeepsie, NY, when he was 13 and was in the Big Easy on a personal trip, his niece Camille Weaver told the Post and Courier.
“He loved Charleston and loved fighting for what’s right,” she said. “I’ve never met anyone more committed and hardworking than him. He was an asset to the Charleston community and will be greatly missed.”
The activist drew national attention last February when he was arrested for jumping over a barricade in an attempt to grab a Confederate flag away from a demonstrator at the College of Charleston.
Members of the South Carolina Secessionist Party had gathered to protest a lecture by activist Bree Newsome, who famously climbed the South Carolina capitol flagpole to remove its Confederate flag in 2015.
D’Baha was slapped with disorderly conduct charges as a result of the incident, which was caught on air.
“Not another generation of people are going to be intimidated by this flag,” he told the Washington Post after the incident, adding he’d tried to wrestle the flag away to “help them understand what it is to meet a real resistance, to meet people that aren’t scared.”
In the hopes of bringing d’Baha’s body back to Charleston for a funeral, his niece started a GoFundMe drive that had raised almost double its $7,500 goal by Wednesday.
via: https://nypost.com/2018/02/07/black-lives-matter-leader-shot-dead/
Man Faces Life In Prison For Stealing $31 Worth Of Candy
A New Orleans man could spend the rest of his life in jail after allegedly shoving “$31 worth of candy bars into his pockets at a Dollar General store.”
The man, 34-year-old Jacobia Grimes, is being charged by prosecutors under the state’s “habitual-offender law.”
Grimes has five prior convictions for theft. All of Grimes convictions “involved thefts of less than $500.” His last conviction was for stealing “some socks and trousers.”
Grimes appeared in court last week and pled not guilty. He faces a potential sentence of 20 years to life. He has already spent 9 years in jail for his previous convictions.
The decision to come down hard on Grimes met a skeptical audience from Judge Franz Zibilich, who is overseeing the case.
“It’s not even funny, 20 years to life for a Snickers bar, or two or three or four,” Zibilich said. If Grimes is found guilty, Louisiana law could leave Zibilich little discretion over the sentence.
Louisiana’s habitual offender law has been in place for 30 years. The result has been that “[s]entences of several decades, or even life, for nonviolent crimes are not unusual in Louisiana.” In other states, individuals convicted of similar crimes “would have received a much shorter sentence or no jail time at all.”
Grimes’ case is an example of how Louisiana became the “world’s prison capital.” A 2012 expose by The Times-Picayune found that the state imprisons more of its citizens than any other states and its incarceration rate is “nearly five times Iran’s, 13 times China’s and 20 times Germany’s.”
A major factor driving Louisiana’s massive inmate population is money. Each prisoner costs Lousiana an average of $18,800 per year. Sending Grimes to prison for 20 years would cost the state around $376,000.
“A majority of Louisiana inmates are housed in for-profit facilities, which must be supplied with a constant influx of human beings or a $182 million industry will go bankrupt,” The Times-Picayune reported.